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Thursday the 14th of April, Team Zagreb, the winners of the first edition of the Junior InterCity League (JICL), played a match against team Cayne. The Croatians were Lara, Ivan, Mate, and Ognjen Stanicic. Ognjen has sent us this brief chronicle of the match.
The match started out really bad for us, Cayne took a big lead (2 overbid games, wrong 5 level decision, let through a game, went down in a game which could have made), but we started to catch up. Board 14 was interesting. Both tables got to 4s, but we got doubled. The trump suit broke 5-0, but the double helped pick up, and even though the defense had a chance to set it in the end with a trump promotion, +590 to Croatia. At the other table, there was no double, and after good defence +12 to Croatia.
Then our teammates bid a cold slam that wasn’t bid at our table.
Last swing came on board 23. After completely different auctions, both tables got to a slightly optimistic 4♥. You have to lead with ♠10x ♥AKT ♦Q109x ♣Kxxx. At our table we preempted in clubs, I lead a club, and my partner switched to his diamond singleton, -1. The other table lead clubs, but since they didn’t bid, his partner continued clubs with xx in the dummy (declarer ruffing), and that was +620, and +12 imps. The score was 60-65 with 5 to go. But, they were all flattish, so we lost the match 6 imps.
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Ognjen Stanicic