2024 Channel Trophy: Off to London!
The end-of-year event for youth teams
Every year, the weekend before Christmas, the four countries around the Channel (Netherlands, Belgium, England and France) reunite for a friendly competition that gathers three categories: the Under 21s, the Juniors (of whom I am a member this year) and the Girls (with whom I played the Channel Trophy in Utrecht last year).
There was something a little special about the Girls’ category: instead of Belgium, Denmark was represented by four players, including my friends Ella and Julie, who I regularly meet in youth and women’s competitions. It was the Danes who came first in this year’s Channel Trophy U26 W.
This year, the competition took place in London at the Young Chelsea Bridge club. I was playing in the U26s with my junior partner Romaric Guth, along with Théo, Luc, Maxence and Nao 🙂
We played each team twice, with two halves for each game. We played three halves on the Friday evening when we arrived, the last two-legged match on Sunday and everything else on Saturday.
On the Friday evening, we started against the English team. In the absence of Maxence and Théo, we had to play all the Friday matches in the same configuration, with Luc playing with Nao and Roro with me.
When the weekend kicked off, we were behind the Dutch, but we quickly overtook them. Here are two deals from the Saturday games against the Belgians:
A dummy reversal for Roro!
Roro opened 1♠ in North, 2♦ in East, X by me in South (better with 4♥, but my partner will only say 4♥ with 5 cards in the suit – indeed he did -, and I absolutely cannot pass).
East played the ace and king of diamonds, which Roro chose to ruff before betting on a 3-2 trump break by starting with a dummy reversal. He ruffed the clubs with trump winners, crossing back to the dummy with a trump once, then he won the 10 of hearts to dummy’s two winners and club.
A psychological blow at Théo-Luc’s table
Here is Théo’s hand in North. 1♠ shows five cards in spades and 3♦ is a jump cuebid showing a 4-card heart fit and at least a game-invitational hand.
Théo now decided to lead the king of spades to see the dummy.
Théo switched to clubs, hoping for a trick in the suit. Declarer immediately rised with the ace, Luc played the 2 and West put the queen. Théo deduced that the suit was 5521, with 5 clubs in Luc’s hand.
Declarer returned a spade from the dummy to Théo’s ace. Théo knew that he needed the king of diamonds bare opposite to beat (since Luc held 5 hearts, 5 clubs and 2 spades).
So, to prevent declarer from guessing, he had to hide his points as much as possible: he therefore chose to underlead his ace of hearts to make it look like the ace-king of hearts were opposite. Declarer ruffed the second round of hearts in the dummy and a club to return to his hand and make the diamond finesse.
The full deal:
Eulalie and Nao (playing for the U21 and U26 teams) kibitzing each other in turn when they were not playing.
Very fluffy!
A slam deal in a competitive auction for the last match
The final match pitted us against our direct rivals: the Dutch were 12 VPs behind us and needed to win the match by a large margin to take first place from us. Here is a deal that I met with Romaric:
On my right, 2NT showed a heart-diamond two-suiter of at least 5-5, and my double was take-out from about 10 points.
Roro’s double over the pre-emptive 4♦ showed values and I knew that he had the diamond shortage since I had 3 in my hand, so he had 5 or 6 clubs.
I bid 4♥, which for me agreed the club fit. Romaric denied 4 spades by doubling (with a minimum hand, he would say 4♠, and with a strong hand and a spade fit, he can use the 4♥ cuebid). With 5 spades, I would rather have shown them directly over 2NT.
Romaric bid 4♠ (control) and I preferred ending the auction in 6♣, knowing that there would be at least 3 cards in hearts opposite and the small slam would already be complicated enough to play.
6♣ is not obvious to play. You can opt for the diamond finesse or bet everything on the handling of the hearts and spades. Hopefully, my partner didn’t have to play this contract since the opponents chose to defend in 6♦, doubled for 1100.
The full deal:
Two French teams on top of the podium!
After this final match against the Dutch, we won the competition with a 20-VP lead over the runners-up!
(Yes, it was complicated to do blue-white-red…)
Well done to Maxence, Clément, Maximilien, Costa, Eulalie and their captain Totof for their nice victory in the U21s, 2 points ahead of the English!
Preparing for this summer’s championships…
I was really pleased that the weekend went well, as it was the first time Romaric and I were playing an international competition together, and we will be playing the world junior championships this summer 🙂
The team will include Maxence, Nao, Théo and Léo, who was not with us this weekend. Meanwhile, Luc will be playing for the U31 team.
We are all hoping for a good result, including in the U26 Girls, U21 and U16 categories!
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