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Finding (not having!) a Fit.

We know we need to have a minimum of 8 trumps between our two hands, dummy’s and our own, for that suit to be our trump suit. That is called a "fit". It is normally fairly easy to find such a fit when each hand has 4 trumps but can be a little harder when one hand has five and the other three.

It would be easy, for instance, to miss the best game contract with the following hand if you did not conduct a little exploration during the bidding. You hold:

 AK

 QT943

 K762

 J4

with your partner opening 1. You respond 1 and your partner bids 1. With 13 high card points opposite your partner’s opening bid, you know that your side is going to reach a game contract. With your partner bidding both black suits and you having a reasonable holding in both red suits, 3NT may seem to be the best bet…but wait! You have 5 hearts. Just imagine that your partner had 3.

They could not show that kind of support in the bidding so far. If that was the case, then your partner may be very short in diamonds. They may not have any diamonds if they had 6 clubs, 4 spades and 3 hearts. Although we do have a diamond hold, it might not be good enough if we had to lose the lead in setting up a suit in 3NT.

West                          East

  1                             1

  1                            ?
(the opposition are silent)

These are all “maybes” but they are real problems raised. Rather than just bid 3NT directly, it should be time to do a little exploration. We need to make a bid that is forcing and asks our partner more about their hand. That bid is the bid of the unbid (4^th) suit, 2. When we start to play bridge, we learn that we should have at least 4 cards in a suit to bid that suit. Here we do have 4 diamonds and so can make that bid. Yet, as we have discussed in recent weeks, we can make that same bid, of the 4^th suit bid by our side, even if we have less than 4 cards in that suit, to find out more about partner’s hand…like “have they a hold in diamonds?”

If they bid 2NT, or maybe 3, in response to our 2 bid, we would follow up with 3NT as we have our own diamond hold. Yet, say partner bids 2?

West                          East

1                               1

1                               2

2

Partner has chosen to show some support for our suit as opposed to say bidding no-trumps or rebidding their own suit. They are very likely now to have three hearts.

Time for a rethink. If we have a 5-3 heart fit, we should bid 4 not 3NT. It might just be the safer game. Indeed it is as in 3NT, we can see almost certainly  we have to lose the lead to the A before we can make 9 tricks. Let’s look at partner’s hand and start to plan the play in 4 after South led the T.

 

North follows with a spade to trick 1.

Naturally, we will be back on Sunday with all 4 hands.

A little exploration can go a long way to getting to the right contract.

Richard Solomon

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