Shantanu Rastogi's Bridge Page

National Pairs at Home took place on February 27, 2000 at many centres in India.The general standard of deals were quite good especially those played in second session. There is definitely an improvement in the deals over past few years. There were good mix of deals on bidding, card play and defence without making too much fuss about the complex things of bridge. These were real life problems which occurr in high percentage of deals. There were a few murmurs of protest over the scoring of a few deals in Lucknow and this is one area the organizers should look to improve upon. The high scores at Lucknow were:

First Session: NS - 1398 (58.3%) EW - 1557 (64.9%)
Second Session: NS - 1475 (61.4%) EW - 1290 (53.7%)

There ia already a protest in the Sunday Times of India column (Mrach 12, 2000) of Dr. Prakash Paranjape about the scoring of deal 36. It is very surprising that someone as knowledgeble as Dr. Paranjape has chosen to comment that way in a national daily. To me scoring of deal 36 has no flaw and the criticism appears unjustified. I'm forced to write here as I got no reply from Dr. Paranjpe till now. The deal booklet says about deal 36 "If you are looking for a catch in this deal, there was none!". When you set deals for a tournament like Ubhayakar where deals are supposed to have catch , it is prudent to mix certain deals which have no catch just to test the judgement of the good players. This deal was straight forward 3 NT if you don't take risks. But if you are an expert and think of a catch in this deal a finesse of 9 against J10xx of was available. You can make 5 NT this way but as finesse doesn't work you may go down. So it is likely that many looking for a catch may go down in this deal, so even making 3 NT is sufficient to get a good score. I think Dr. Paranjape didn't look at the deal in the totality.

2nd All India Jagdish Agarwal Memorial Oudh Bridge Championship concluded at Oudh Gymkhana, Lucknow on February 14, 2000. There was a low participation this year with 24 teams taking part in the duplicate event. Pals, Delhi (DK Tewari,PC Gupta,MM Chopra,Ajay Sinha,Anand Bhatia) won the duplicate event defeating Jaguar, Kanpur. DK Tewari & PC Gupta also won pairs event. AK Ganguly's team from Calcutta won board a match event. They were perhaps the strongest team of the championship with Manas Mukherji, Rana Roy & AN Bannerji playing for them but got knocked out in quarter finals to a scratch combination. A photograph of prize distribution function.(Sri- NC Rai, BB Lal, Kr Vijayanand Singh, AP Verma (Chief Guest), VK Chaube, Manoj Agarwal (Sponsor)).

All India Lohia memorial bridge tournament concluded at Ganges Club, Kanpur on March 12, 2000. S Roy Choudhary's team from Calcutta won the duplicate event amongst 45 teams defeating Prahladka, Kanpur. Jaiswal, Lucknow won board a match event and the pairs trophy went to RP Narain & A Ray. Organizers also held 5 consolation pairs event to keep all the participants engaged.

Rossel Tea-Soshen Gupta Bridge Championship would take place at Delhi Gymkhana from March 24-26, 2000.

UP State Summer National selection trials would take place at Kanpur from April 7-9, 2000.

Summer Nationals would take place at Sanawar, HP from April 21 -29, 2000.

WBF World Wide Simultaneous Pairs event (formerly known as EPSON) would take place on June 2 & June 3 , 2000. The scoring of this event would be done on internet.

WBF is organising Mind Sports Organization's Worldwide Simultaneous Pairs on August 22 and August 23, 2000. It would be on the lines of Fifth Friday Championship organised by Herman De Wael. The magnitude of the championship would be higher with about 10000 tables results being compiled together.