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The Best Chance.

Recognising the best chance in making your contract is step one to success. Then, if you fail, there will surely be someone to tell you what you should have done! If you have taken the best line, then someone, your partner, even your opponents might say “bad luck”. Yet, why are we being so negative? We have not even gone down yet!

You have bid freely to game (well, it was partner who insisted we play at that level!) with few top honours, no real fit outside our trump suit and only 8 trumps. Plenty of good reasons in that description to go down. However, see if you can justify partner’s optimism.

 

You might have opened this South hand (it does conform to the Rule of 20 for opening bids…sum of high card points and two longest suits equalling at least 20) but after both North and South passed at their first opportunity, South found themselves in 4.

West led a high club and East found a small one in their hand to confirm West had only 6 clubs. Next came a low club which East ruffed with 6. Then  9 from East.

Plan the play.

You need a bit of good luck at this point. With a pre-empt on your left, which included AK, it would not be your lucky day if West owned the K too. So, finesse. West can manage no higher than 8 which you beat in dummy.

Cross-ruffing is just not going to work as you cannot score more than 7 trump tricks and AK. You know you will never score the high J as East easily ruff that card.

and your saving grace might just be?

The diamond suit will take forever to set up for a trick. So, that leaves dummy’s heart suit, the best- looking asset you have. You need to ruff one of dummy’s small club losers in the South hand. Perhaps you can bring in the heart suit for just one loser.

Firstly, though, hope the trump break is kind, and a second trump brings down the defence’s two remaining trumps:

 

There are two successful ways at this point. The pre-empt told you that the majority of the missing hearts will be with East. We trust West is a well-behaved pre-emptor and will have no four-card major. The problem is when West has only two hearts.

One solution is to run 7, which would be successful had West held a doubleton including 8 (yes, they might and should cover with 8 but defenders have been known to play low, lazily). Declarer would get to table with a diamond ruff and cash AK and could take a ruffing finesse against East’s remaining honour if necessary.

Alternatively, declarer could play AK and ruff a heart, return to dummy and ruff a second heart meaning that dummy’s 8 would be the third trick for the defence. This would work whenever the hearts break 4-3, although that occurs only 62% of the time.

The important point for South is to realise that the heart suit is the key suit and needs to bring in at least two more tricks apart from the AK for this rather thin game to be successful. When you record your 10 tricks, you migght even get a "well played" comment or two from those at the table.

Where to from here?

 

It seemed quite a straightforward auction until South popped up with their weak- jump overcall. Now, you have to decide on your next bid. West’s double is not for penalties while their 1 promised at least three. You are playing Teams.

Richard Solomon

 

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