A Great Week

It was a great week for bridge blogging. I'm thrilled when articulate and talented bridge players start blogging, especially if they are relatively young since that means they may continue to bridge blog and/or publish for many decades.

One new blog is by 30-something Sartaj Hans:

http://theimpchimp.blogspot.com/

He already has a masterpiece of a posting:

http://theimpchimp.blogspot.com/2009/03/fifteen-thousand-dollar-question.html

Playing a $15K hand against Meckwell and then discussing it with Versace! Wow!

Returning to active blogging is 22 year old Justin Lall:

http://justinlall.com/

A terrific feature of Justin's new site is you can ask him questions, and the following post on matchpoints tops n' bottoms is a must read:

http://justinlall.com/2009/04/03/ask-justin-3/

At the Masterpoints Press http://www.bridgeblogging.com/ site, Linda and Ray Lee continue to assemble a wealth of content. They have now added the "Aces on Bridge" column as a blog, and Linda has added a "Best of the Blogs" section (http://www.bridgeblogging.com/?page_id=143). One expects that we may see more "curation" happening in the world of online bridge content.

Separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and -- most importantly - giving folks who don't want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent.

(From: http://www.businessinsider.com/can-curation-save-media-2009-4)

Before curation can save media, original content needs to save media, and this last week was a great one for the bridge community. An added, cough-cough, plus for me was that I had bronchitis and reading was more worthwhile than nothing-to-sneeze-at writing.

Curation editor: please insert seamless segue here to transition to the next part (and please give me bonus points for using transition as an intransitive verb).

One of my favorite holdings in notrump contracts is Jxx opposite xx.

Yes, that is not much of a stopper, but if they don't lead that suit it can function as a virtual stopper.

Here's a hand I played a while back in 1NT (14-17) as West at matchpoints.

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The lead was a small heart - I won the heart king and played a spade to the jack. North continued hearts, and I drove out the club ace. The opponents played hearts again, and I ran the clubs. Now I still had the same seven tricks I started with (3 hearts, 3 clubs, diamond ace), but the early spade play had left the opponents with the wrong impression of what was necessary to keep, allowing me to score an overtrick for a 90+% score.