A well-timed psych is one of the most enjoyable aspects of bridge. The reaction of the opponents when (if?) they realise they've been had and the hoped-for good score all stick in the memory for a long time. An unsuccessful psych is no less memorable as this hand taken from the Tuesday Pairs Championship at Brighton shows. It was late in the evening, so there had been ample opportunity to drink but little time remained to achieve any goals set for the evening.

Partner opens a weak 2, which could be fairly filthy. RHO overcalls 2 and you decide to have a piece of this. Partner thinks about alerting this, but in the end chooses not to. Nothing much can be read into this, as nobody seems to understand the new EBU alerting rules for doubles (aside: nobody understood the old EBU alerting rules either, but apparently they have changed.) The 3 bid is completely unexpected and I react by applying Hamman's Law as I've no idea what is going on. When this gets doubled I retreat into 4 — after all LHO might have a string of diamonds plus an entry. Alternatively he could be doubling on the auction. LHO then bids 4 which comes round to me.

Now:
i) I've doubled 2 for penalty already
ii) AJx can't be bad, especially if partner has club values for his 3 bid.
iii) Nobody appears to know what is going on.

Careful consideration of points i, ii and iii lead me to doubling this. LHO immediately redoubles, which is slightly suspicious, but ends the auction. The Q is led and dummy hits with:

So there are six spades to the Queen-Ten in dummy and two bullets! It seems that South must have psyched, even if the direct seat over a preempt isn't a classic psych position. The full hand was:

Despite the trumps all being onside, the contract drifted three off and +1000 was, unsurprisingly, worth all the matchpoints.

After the laughter had died down, the reason behind the psych emerged. Eve was celebrating her 21st birthday and was determined to psych at least once in the session and had unfortunately endplayed herself by leaving it to the last board. Maybe by next year she'll have recognised a better psych position...