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Two Slips to a Making Game.

Today’s contract should have been defeated and generally was but produced a couple of interesting situations which were missed at one table, the combination of which allowed the declarer to slither home.

North, dummy, had a strong hand and pushed on to game when they might have tried to defeat the opponent’s spade part-score. West led 8 and this is what East saw.

 

 

Any thoughts as East when declarer called for the K from dummy?

During the play of the heart game, at every table at some point either the declarer or West led a club which was covered by the king in the North hand. At every table, East won A and returned J, indicating holding 10. The timing at other tables was different and sometimes North was declarer. It is interesting to think whether taking A at trick 1 is indeed the best defence.

The lead could be top of a sequence and the worse scenario if East ducked the K was that declarer held the singleton, probably 9. Even then while the defence had lost a trick, South would not be able to discard on the Q while you held AJ10. The trick lost might well come back.

That is the worst situation. On the other extreme is that the lead was a singleton and then you could give West one ruff..but Q would still be available for a discard.

What is a better situation for the defence is if West had led a doubleton, a very possible occurrence. What then would it matter if East won or ducked the opening lead? The answer is “communication”.

Let’s see what happened. East fired back the J at trick 2 with South and West following with low clubs. Q took the trick and declarer called for the A and a second heart. These were the four hands:

 

The second round of hearts went to the JQK. The defence had taken two tricks and surely the A was a third trick. West was now guilty of not thinking through the whole hand. West knew South would have 3 spades (East’s bidding indicated 6) and unless they were QJ, then South would need to ruff at least one spade in dummy. Also, unless East held 5 clubs, South had a club loser as well, presumably 9.

West cashed A and followed with 10. Declarer ruffed in dummy and these cards remained:

South was able to play a diamond to hand, ruff J, return again to hand with a diamond, draw trump and return to dummy to discard the club loser on the 4^th round of diamonds. Game made.

West could have defeated the game by returning a third trump after cashing A. South would end up with one black suit loser. However, how much easier it would it have been had East ducked the K at trick 1. West had to regain the lead with either A or K. Either way, West could continue with their second club and the defence would soon have A, a heart and two club tricks.

Both defenders had chances to defeat this game. By winning A at trick 1, unless East switched to their singleton (and even then South could play two rounds of trumps) , they would never regain the lead to cash their second club trick. Communication with their partner was key.

Communication….and counting declarer’s hand. Had even one of these principles been observed, the defence would have recorded a plus score.

Richard Solomon

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