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For Junior, Intermediate and Novice Players…and others.

Winners and Losers.

When you are defending, you would like to win tricks whenever you can, ideally to prevent the declarer from making their contract. However, success can come in strange ways like intentionally losing tricks! Before we start intentionally losing a trick, let’s go back a step to the opening lead. Over to you: 

 

You open 2, a Weak 2 and hear your left-hand opponent bid 2NT, showing about 15-18 hcp with a hold in your heart-suit. It would seem South could have bid 3(transfer) showing 5+ spades but elected to jump straight to the spade game. So, what would you lead?

We learn, against a suit contract, never to lead low from a suit where we hold the ace. Ideally, we do not lead the ace either unless we have the king. There are a couple of exceptions, where we hold A doubleton or singleton and hope to score a ruff or where we have a long suit and hope to give our partner a ruff. Well, that could be the case here. So, let’s try the A. A rather threatening heart suit appears in dummy:

 

Our partner follows with 2 and declarer 7. Well, we had a plan. We may as well follow it through. So, we continue with 9, kind of suggesting partner switches to the higher non-trump suit, diamonds, should they win the trick.

Wonderful! They do, ruffing with 2 as South plays 10. Back comes a diamond (10) covered by South’s Q to your ace. What next? South has no more hearts. So, our West decided to continue with a second diamond. The defence had taken 3 tricks. They were to take no more as the contract made!

 

K won the next trick. South then drew trumps in two rounds finishing in dummy with A. Next came K, Q and J with South discarding a club each time. They then played A and with only 2 trumps left in hand, claimed the last two tricks. What a shame for the defenders after such a great start.

To lose can be to win!

 

Sometimes it can be so! Our partner had given a big clue by playing 10. Had they K, they should lead a low diamond. So, we should look elsewhere. Playing a club is understandable but wrong as we have already set up three discards for the declarer. So, the best, and only winning defence, is to play a third heart, knowing that our partner will ruff and be over-ruffed by South. Note, though, that reduces declarer’s winners in dummy from three to two.

That means that South would have to take the club finesse to make their contract..and that fails. 

 
for the right defence

Did we know that was the situation? No. Yet, the signs were that reducing dummy’s winners from three to two was as good defence as any. You cannot win every trick but sometimes as above, you can be a spoiler and deprive one’s opponents of one of their winning tricks.

Happy Easter. More after the holiday break.

Richard Solomon

 

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