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Adventures of a bridge professional

Adventures of a bridge professional.
Columns by Dutch National Team player Sjoert Brink. Check out the section Columns

Disasters *
How strong is that 1NT reply? *

The 2001 final of the Dutch Meesterklasse ('Master League', the top league) for teams.

Modalfa (Amsterdam) plays De Lombard (Rotterdam), contesting the Dutch championship. Any Amsterdam-Rotterdam encounter is characterised by intense rivalry, like Ajax - Feyenoord at football (soccer).
Noteworthy is that in that year's final all of the contesting partnerships were new: none of them had been playing in the Master League for longer than a year. Perhaps that is what caused the disaster below (by the way: Muller — De Wijs, to name one of the pairs, still play as a pair today, in 2010; so maybe some things have changed.)

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A less successful penalty double *

forresterThe 1989 European Championships in Turku, Finland, Great-Britain vs. Austria.

Englishman Tony Forrester (photo), then already a world class player (he still is, so he is at the top for decades now), deliberately underbid, giving the opponents all the rope they needed to hang themselves.
Of course, with hindsight it is easy to say that the opponent in question should have known better. But it is the hallmark of the real crack to recognise opportunities in which he can make life miserable for his opponents.

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