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Listen (to the bidding) and look (at your hand).  

Today’s problem might seem no problem for some but for the vast majority of North-South pairs who faced it, they could not come to the right conclusion. So, if you get the wrong answer below, do not despair as you have plenty of company.

 

After passing first up, you are not jolted into bidding by your partner’s take-out double. Yet, your partner has not finished bidding. Is it to be a hat-trick of passes?

Two queens and a jack may not seem much but what is your partner saying? With a basic overcall in the 10-15 hcp range, they are likely to have bid 2 rather than double. So, we should assume they are stronger than that when they bid again. We may well still come up short in the combined 25 hcp recommended for game but there are other considerations.

One important fact is the length of our spade suit. We can probably assume East has at least 5 spades and depending on their methods, West has at least 3. It would be rather disappointing if North could not ruff the second round of the suit….and maybe they are void.

Coupled with that, we have three decent hearts. While our partner is likely to have more than 5 hearts, 5 is the absolute minimum. We have a fit.

Then, it is highly likely that one of our minor queens will be useful. We do not know which but one of them will bolster up our partner’s holding. All up, we have a rather useful hand to show to our partner…and we should be laying down dummy in the contract of 4 and not 3. Let’s look:

 

 South’s hand is as predicted and game is easier to make than we might have anticipated. We only needed partner to have no spade loser or if they did have one, no heart loser and as you can see, there was no loser in either suit. There could be bad days when the heart finesse failed (East did have the majority of opposition hcp) and there was a bad diamond break. Yet, one needed to be in game for all the times the breaks were normal, as above.

Neither opponent saw fit to bid 4, which is a better result for them than conceding -650. Neither the East nor West hands look good for sacrificing while the slow way 4 was bid might suggest there was some defence to it.

 The best defence to 4x would see South starting with a high diamond and then leading to North’s Q, after an encouraging signal from North. Although East can later take a trump finesse, if they dare, after starting with a high trump, a low spade towards the J is an easier way to discover the bad break. However, after South gets the defence correct, a third and then a fourth round of hearts will put East under a lot of pressure to avoid a second trump loser. While A initial lead could see East escape for down one, in reality, South may well have pressed on to 5.

That, though, is all dependent on North raising to game in the first place. Hopefully, you did.

Richard Solomon

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