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for Junior, Intermediate and Novice players..and others. It's Friday.

What a shame. Great bidding to a slightly aggressive but very reasonable contract…and yet our North-South pair recorded a minus score all because the declarer remembered the rule and followed it! That does not seem fair…or does it?

 

South’s 2 rebid showed a minimum hand with long diamonds. Although North had only 11 hcp, they too had useful looking diamonds. Thus, they raised to 3 tempting South to bid 3NT if they had stops in the unbid major suits. South did and so the reasonable 3NT contract was reached.

West led 3 (4^th highest from length) and East followed with Q. As South, how would you play this board to give yourself the best chance to make 9 tricks?

South remembered some of the advice they had been given about playing suits where the queen is missing. If you and dummy have 8 cards in the suit, you take a finesse on the second round though if you have 9, then you play the top two cards and hope that either the queen is singleton, or that both opponents have two cards in the suit, something called “eight ever, nine never” when deciding if to finesse.

So, they won the first trick with the A and played a diamond to the king and a second to the ace…and West started to think about what to discard!

 

That was bad news for South who had to concede a diamond to East’s queen. The defence could now take lots of tricks…three hearts and A were enough to defeat the contract.

We can see that taking the diamond finesse would have given South 9 tricks (6 diamonds, AK and A) but was it right to do so when the standard advice was to play K then A?

There was indeed good reason to do so even with 9 diamonds between the 2 hands. That is because, even if West won the second round of diamonds with Q, there was still a reasonable chance they would make their contract.

Firstly, if West tried to score heart tricks by cashing K (hoping declarer held AJ doubleton), the J will be declarer’s 9^th trick. Then, as long as West holds A (and you can say there is a 50% chance they do), K will be the 9^th trick, either when West cashes A or if they lead a low spade away from the ace. If West switches to a club, you will need to finesse for Q for your 9^th trick. That’s still a good chance of success….and of course the other good point in finessing the Q is on the actual lay-out.

There seemed enough reasons to break the rule in this situation and had they done so, South would have been recording a nice + 600.

 

Knowing the rules is great: knowing when to break them is even better!

Richard Solomon

Over the next two weeks, the World Youth Championships will be taking place in the Netherlands. New Zealand is sending an Under 21 team to participate. We will start next week to introduce you to the New Zealand players and bring you updates and hopefully a few deals from their matches. 

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