Bulletin

Mafioso - Los Tollos (in English) author kaapo, 12.10.2006 at 23.12.
Summary: Juniors bashing the Stars

Thursday, 12th of October, featured the first round match of group B: Mafioso vs Los Tollos. Mafioso is the Swedish representant of the League and consists of Swedish junior team members. Los Tollos also has some national team players: most of them have represented the Finnish open team and also have BBO stars. This might have suggested a hard time for the Swedish youngsters beforehand.

All 16 boards vere played in one set. Andreas Jansson (vban) and Peter Berndtsson (gigapip) played for Mafioso against Los Tollos players Johan Blomqvist (jovibl) and Kari Mäkikangas (talion) at Table 1. Both pairs played a natural system at this table.

Table 2 consisted of Simon Bech (ringostar) and Erik Fryklund (peacockk) for Mafioso and Mika Salomaa (mikki) and Pekka Viitasalo (bagman) for Los Tollos. Both pairs here were strong clubbers: peacock - ringostar a standardish Swedish strong club (17+) with 5 card majors, a highly nebulous 1♦ and natural 2♣ and 2♦ openings denying a 4 card major. mikki - bagman open 1♣ already on 15 HCPs and 1M with 9-14 and 4 cards. Their 1st or 2nd hand pass shows 0-8 HCPs.

The juniors didn't let the stars blind themselves. Swedes won bunches of IMPs on 5 level decisions. They won 5 on board 3, 10 on board 4 and 6 on board 9. board 11 was the greatest swing:

11       ♠AT854      South North
South    ♥AK8        1C    1NT   15+     10+ 5+M  
none     ♦KJ87       2C    2H     R       5+S
         ♣2          2S    3C     Sets S  Short C
♠96        ♠73      3S    4D             Cuebid
♥QJ3       ♥T642    4S    4NT            RKCB
♦Q9532     ♦6         5C    5D      0 or 3 Q ask
♣975       ♣QJ8643    6C    7S      SQ+CK
         ♠KQJ2
         ♥975
         ♦AT4
         ♣AKT

Dummy play came down to finding ♦Q - wrong. So it was 14 IMPs to Mafioso who played 6♠ at the other table.
♠ lead and a ♦ shift and a later ruff sunk 4♥ on board 14 for 10 IMPs to Los Tollos. That wasn't enough, however, and the Swedish juniors took a handy 19 - 11 (42 - 26) victory.