Recently, my regular partner Petter Tøndel was playing with Geir Helgemo in the county league. The opponents were a young and strong team (bronze winners in the last European University Championships). Geir held:

Petter opened 1, and after a pass Geir decided to reply 1 with his meager collection of high-cards. From then on things seemed to go from bad to worse:

Geir definitely was not very happy with the way things had developed (he actually confessed to me that he for a brief moment had considered passing 2!). The opening lead was West's only challenge on the hand, and he chose a trump:

East inserted the Q and Petter won in hand and made the excellent play of a small spade to the 10 and K. East returned a trump (doesn't matter), Petter won in dummy and played a small club. When East held KQx the doubled contract was easily made!

Some may say this only goes to prove that good players are always lucky. When some jokes were made about this board in the bar after this weekend's 1st division match Geir instead summed it up like this: "I don't understand why everyone pokes fun at my bidding, we did after all bid to the only making game........".