| 21st European Youth Team Championships | Page 5 | Bulletin 2 - Friday 13 July 2007 |
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USBF Senior Trials by John Carruthers With two boards to play in the Kasle v Assemi semi-final match to decide the USA Teams in the Senior Bowl in Shanghai, Kasle led Assemi by 17 IMPs. This is Board 29, on which the vugraph commentators predicted that Assemi would win 13 IMPs for staying out of a ‘hopeless’ slam. Dan Gerstman proved them wrong by making it.
West might have been warned by the bidding that he needed to cash the club ace to avoid being endplayed, but he chose the king of diamonds as the opening lead. Dan Gerstman then played double dummy to bring home the slam. He won the diamond ace, then ruffed a diamond. He next crossed to dummy with a trump and ruffed dummy’s last diamond. He cashed a top heart to extract West’s last trump and exited with a small club. West was left with a choice of ways to surrender the twelfth trick. The position was:
On the diamond queen return, Gerstman would ruff in dummy, discarding a spade from hand, cross to the ace of spades, pull the last trump, discarding dummy’s spade ten, and take the last four tricks with dummy’s clubs. On the actual spade return, he won the queen, pulled the last trump and claimed. This resulted in a well-earned 13 IMP pick-up against the Four Heart game bid at the other table. Why did Gerstman play the way he did when the alternative line of a squeeze-endplay against West (if he’d held the king-queen-jack of diamonds and the spade king) looked very attractive on the bidding? The answer is that East played the deuce of diamonds at trick one, encouraging! This board put the match out of reach, so Gaylor Kasle/Russ Arnold, Bobby Wolff/Dan Morse and John Sutherlin/Dan Gerstman will be USA1 in China next October. (USA 2 will be Rose Meltzer/Grant Baze, Alan Sontag/Roger Bates and Bart Bramley/Lew Stansby.) |
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