Greece lost narrowly (14-16) to fearsome Poland and is keeping 3rd place in Tenerife; only snag: the teams immediately lower had in general big wins, so the gap is closing. The team immediately higher, first-placed Russia, got demolished by lowly SanMarino, 5 to 25, so this gap is also closing. When I wrote the other day that lowly-placed team offered the leaders a chance to score 20+ I didn't mean _that_ direction!

Anyway, the biggest swing suffered by Greece in the match was a missed slam.

Here are the EW hands

West dealer, EW vul.

K Q 9 2                 J 10 5
A                          10 5
K J 7                    A Q 10 5 2
Q 10 6 4 2            A K 8

Skoularikis  Lesniewski  Zotos  Martens
1C               pass          1D       2H
dbl             4H              dbl        all pass

I am not sure what opener's double is (if support or merely negative) so I can't point fingers to anyone concerning the missed slam. All the more since Fotis Skoularikis is a friend :-) I tend to give a lot of credit to the Poles, though.

In the other room, the Polish West opened a Polish 1C and East replied 2D which is probably natural and game forcing, so now the intervention was much less effective -6D was reached.

Even in a plain 5-card major system, I like very much the 2D reply; that is, if one plays that a jump shift is forcing to game merely a-la-Acol, not promising the world's fair.

Nikos Sarantakos

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© 2001 Nikos Sarantakos
sarant@pt.lu
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