E-W can make 12 tricks in hearts, spades or NT, but only 3 pairs reached the slam. At the table above Balázs Kotányi played 3NT and managed to get all the tricks by squeezing North. However, László Marcin could have avoided his fate, if he had led a diamond honor instead of a small diamond. After leading a small one his partner had to play the jack in the first round, and he was stuck with the sole guard of both minors.

Here is another interesting situation, after the seven of diamonds lead, how do you plan to make 3NT, which card would you play from dummy?

At first glance you wouldn’t even think that board 4 in I/B can be interesting. The contract was 2spades on several tables but whatever the declarers tried, the defenders had an answer. For example on the diagram above, you can see Ádám Magyar and Tamás Hoffmann squeezing dummy for the -2. It turned out to be a push board at the end, but still their play worth to look at.

The final rankings in group B:

1. INDIA-B U26: – Babhrubahan Bose, Arya Chakraborty, Surajit Bar, Pradip Dey
2. ITALIA 2: – Matteo Meregally, Alessandro Carletti, Maddalena Pelaggi, Annachiara Pelaggi
3. FRANCE FUNBRIDGE: – Luc Bellicaud, Theo Guillemin, Clement Teil, Leo Rombaut

The summer is not completely over yet, but our Summer Series has finished. 21 pairs played on the last day and they were not only competing for the first place of this competition, but also for the cumulated championship through the whole summer. The winners of the tournament are Gábor Macskásy with Gábor Szőts and with his last victory Macskásy became the most successful player of the ’19 Summer Series as well. The second best result of the eight weeks’ turned out to be a triple tie, Krisztián Tichler, István Kerti and Marcell Surányi finished with the same amount of points right behind Macskásy. You can find the results here.

We saw many interesting boards this week as well, let’s look at some of them.

Gábor Szőts in this board got the opportunity to make 9 tricks but he had to be careful to have enough communication between his hand and the dummy. Making the second overtrick in 1Nt resulted in 88,5%.

Here Gábor Macskásy realized that playing 5C in a pairs tournament will most likely be a bad board for them. This way going down in 6C couldn’t be much worse, so he risked bidding six in hope for a better result.

The seventh competition of the Summer Series is over and we have new winners. Out of the 22 pairs Ödön Dienes and László Sztrapkovics reached the highest percentage but there was a close fight between the best pairs until the end of the tournament.

This week’s boards were filled with the most interesting hands giving great bidding challenges to the players. The Hand of the Week was chosen out of them, the very last board:

East-West can easily make 13 tricks in hearts or clubs but they can’t really bid it since it depends on the heart finesse. North-South can try to save it in diamonds or spades but they should consider that they might as well push East-West into the grand slam. On the diagram above you can see László Honti’s save over 6 hearts. Not surprisingly there were many interesting solutions from both sides in this board and we are eager to hear what would you have done with these hands?