On the plane to Nice, on our way to the Open European Team Championships in San Remo, I sat next to Danny Molenaar. We discussed Dutch bridge and our expectations. He hoped to make it to the knock-out phase. And I? Well, I boasted a little. I said I expected to win the gold in the teams just like that, since I could not think of a stronger team under the participators. After all, in an event like this (Open Championship) almost all strong teams line up a sponsor, weakening themselves.

The scheme of this Open European Teams Championship was tricky. First a group of six, from which the first three would qualify for the A-Swiss (Swiss is a tournament organisation in which - in principle - the number one in the actual ranking plays the number two and so on; however teams do not play each other twice, except in the final round, -Ed.).
In the A-Swiss teams would have to finish in the top 27 (since five teams were admitted from the B-Swiss).
After that there would be the knock-out phase, 28 deals per match. In short: quite a lottery.

We were lucky to have Bauke Muller-Simon de Wijs as team mates. They were in the winning team four years ago and two years ago they won the bronze with team mates Vincent Ramondt - Berry Westra and us. They must therefore like this tournament.

We experienced a sticky beginning. We lost no less then three out of five group matches. By soundly beating the Romanians we yet made it to the A-Swiss as number three.
There, in the first match, we met a team of very tough Poles, who had decided not to play a single wrong card against us. We did not match that, so after one match we found ourselves bottom of the list. Understandably we thought this was not going to be our tournament.

However, after three (out of seven) rounds we had climbed to the 32nd spot. Then we played the 2008 winners, team Bessis.
They had crushed us in the semi final that year, so I was keen on having my revenge.
This was the first deal:

		♠	K 8
		♥	J 5
		♦	K Q 10 9 4 2
		♣	Q J 9
		♠	A J 7 4 2
		♥	4
		♦	A J 7 5 3
		♣	A 6

¹ diamond suit

West led the ♥K and East, young Bessis (some 26 years old I guess), overtook with the ace to switch to the ♣8.
Yuk, so far for my double chance. I mean: without that switch I would have had two chances:
1 After drawing trumps, I would have played the ♠K and the ♠A and ruffed the third spade. I would make my slam if the spades were 3-3 or the ♠Q came down in the second round (I could discard my two club losers on the two good spades).
2 If the ♠Q would have been in the four card suit, I would have ruffed good the fifth spade. Since I would then be able to discard one club only, I would take the club finesse, my second chance.

Now, after the club switch, I could not follow the sequence mentioned above. I was forced to choose between finessing or winning with the ace and ruffing a spade.
The club finesse offered a 50% success rate against 52% for playing for four spade tricks (3-3 distribution or the ♠Q in the doubleton).

But then of course there is one's table feeling. It told me that East, if he did not have the ♣K, would have played back a small club. Therefore the ♣8 indicated East had the ♣K. In my perception that 50% chance of the ♣K being on side, had grown to some 80%...
So I decided to play low. One down - and East had three spades, one of which was the ♠Q. Arrrrrgh.

We lost the match by a large margin. In order not to drop out in the preliminaries, we now had to win 19-11 on average in the last three rounds. Not an easy task. When, in the sixth round, we had to play the Mixed champions, we knew it was going to be very tough indeed.
Fortunately this deal turned up:

		♠	A K J 4 3 2
		♥	5 4
		♦	Q 10 8 7
		♣	A
		♠	Q 10 7 6
		♥	A 10 3 2
		♦	A 4
		♣	K 10 4

The opponents at the other table missed this slam. This contributed to us narrowly qualifying for the knock-out phase.
There we played some of the world's leading players, like Zia Mahmood, Fantoni, Lauria, Aronov (European Pairs Champion) and the Herbst brothers.
Read my next column to find out how that went.