We knew going into Swiss Teams that it would be a long day, but somehow we hadn't realized that we were going to be playing seven rounds of seven boards each. We started at 11:00 am and finished around 6:00 pm. That's a lot of cards!
The most entertaining play came towards the end. Our opponents were a young couple (young, of course, being a relative term). They were 0-5, having lost all of the rounds up to that point. Our team was 2-3, which all of a sudden didn't seem so bad. Once we started to play, it quickly became apparent that these two had quite a complicated bidding system.
I wish I could replicate the bidding here, but that is impossible; it was just too complex. I'm still struggling with trying to remember the differences in leads when playing suit vs no trump contracts, so the esoteric meanings that flew across the table were beyond me. However, I can still picture this lively and friendly pair as they slowly and intricately worked their way to a slam contract. It took quite a while, since every bid was alerted and I kept asking what each bid meant. I just couldn't resist. For example, one seemingly innocuous bid--was it 3 hearts?--meant that the bidder had a certain number of "points" in her hand. These points were assigned to aces and kings, so she had either one ace and three kings or two aces and no kings (or something like that). I was happy when they finally reached a 6 no trump contract, since I was on lead and was holding two aces. That took care of that.
At the end of the day we were 3-4, which didn't seem very good. But then I found out that we had gotten silver--the first for Melissa and Jeanne--so I guess we did okay after all.
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