Four teams entered to the Hungarian Open Trials. According to the rules the format was knock-out with directed draw. It was a great honor for us when the players of the first semifinal requested to play on tablets rather than cards. The two teams were DUMBOVICH and FÉSZEK and they played 128 boards for two days. After a long weekend DUMBOVICH won with a big difference.
We wanted to make the broadcast for our viewers as enjoyable as possible, so they not only could have followed each board card by card on our vugraph site, but we also organized a live commentary. Five Hungarian players volunteered to be commentators, and after overcoming some technical difficulties at the beginning, the livestream went flawlessly.
Here are some interesting slam boards for those who didn’t follow the event:
Dániel Tubak played 6♠ in this board. After taking the trump lead with the ace, he returned the jack of clubs. This smart play gave him some extra mathematical and psychological chances, for example East not having the queen rushing in with the ace. In this layout he didn’t need any help: East took the trick with the queen and switched to a small heart. Declarer won the ace, discarded two hearts from his hand on the ace and king of diamonds, crossruffed hearts and clubs and discarded his last club on his remaining high diamond. Finally, he crossed to his hand with a diamond ruff and claimed the last two tricks with the king and queen of spades.
Here is a nice squeeze from Gábor Winkler in 6♦. South lead his ace of hearts then played a spade. Declarer took the trick on dummy and cashed the king of hearts, crossed to his hand with the ace of diamonds and ruffed his small heart. He took two more rounds of diamonds finishing on dummy, discovering the bad trump distribution. His careful play gave him some extra chance: squeezing South in hearts and clubs. He cashed to ace of spades, crossed in clubs and finally drew the last diamond. The plan worked, South now had no more cards to discard. He decided to get rid of his club, so declarer had now nothing else to do but playing his clubs.
Sometimes you must deceive your opponent as much as possible in order to defeat a contract. This is what Balázs Szegedi did in this board. He very quickly realized that the only chance for the contract to go down is if declarer misguesses the diamond suit and he did everything to “help” him: he discarded both of his two small diamonds keeping only the queen. Declarer didn’t really have a chance to visualize the queen in South’s hand lost two tricks in the suit.
