What is the incentive to win the Corwen Trophy? Well, winning it would mean not having to play in it again for one thing! It's not that the bridge itself is not enjoyable, and the event is well enough organised. It's just that playing in such a mixed ability field, you're always being buffeted by freak scores (in both directions), since virtually all the field adopt (over)aggressive tactics in the auction leading to many lucky or ridiculous results. It's all too easy to let these factors affect your bridge.
We found ourselves in the position of being a cumulative 12% ahead of the field going into the last session of the event. An almost unassailable lead you'd hope. We'd played solidly, and had more than our fair share of good luck in the first three sessions averaging something like 63.5%. Surely now we could count our chickens...
It just so happened that all our bad luck had been reserved for our last session. In this session, everyone seemed inspired against us and for all our efforts we were unable to muster more than 47% to be overtaken into second place. A 50% final session would have been enough to win the event. In retrospect, I think this could have been just about attainable if we had been as solid as in earlier sessions.
At the time, 2nd seemed disappointing, not least because we'll have to try again next year. On the other hand, with any luck we'll get knocked out in the strong Cambridge heat of the County Pairs next year.
And now for a hand. East deals and opens a 12-14 1NT. West
bids 2
(Stayman), North doubles
(showing a good hand), East shows his hearts, and you as South
settle for 3NT. A diamond is led, and dummy is a pleasing
sight, as it seems from the auction that West has 4 small
spades so that we can take 4 spade tricks, 4 diamonds and two
hearts for the contract.
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Can we make more? On the auction AK of clubs are marked in
the East hand, so simply leading a club towards the Q will lead
to a straightforward 11 tricks. Now we're getting greedy, how
about a 12th? Well East does not know how strong we are here,
so you lead 10, duly ducked by East,
and you win the trick with the Q. You cash another two
diamonds, and then lead the queen of spades, East covering.
We've got eleven tricks, but the count is wrong for a
squeeze, as we've got too many losers to duck a trick. The only
possibility is squeeze out the winners before ducking (a
delayed duck). What are we playing for here? We'd really like
East to have 
QJ10, when he is
genuinely squeezed. As it was, the ending was:
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East had an unpalatable choice at trick 9 after I led the
J from hand (and discarded the last
club from dummy) of coming down to the bare QJ (playing partner for either the 10 or the K) or
discarding a club honour. The heart discard is probably right
since conceding 13 tricks is unlikely to be much worse than
conceding 12, but East discarded K.
Now it is essential to exit with the 4
from hand (not the 2) for the maximum humiliation factor of
winning trick 13 with the 2.
Q4