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  …. or doing what you are not supposed to do!

Breaking the bridge rules is a dangerous thing to do. Those rules are there for a reason and if you find cause to deviate, well, you had better be right!

 

Your pre-empt pushed your opponents into what may be an awkward contract. Your partner leads K and follows that with Q with declarer following to both. What now? The game is Pairs.

Well, the first thing you are going to do is to play A on partner’s queen. If you might not have any great inspiration of what to do next, then surely there is nothing more inspired that can come from your partner’s side of the table.

The least inspirational continuation must be a trump, an admission that there is nothing to be done. Can we do better than that?

Not a club unless you throw the second one under the carpet! Yet, has your partner really got the ace? It’s hard to believe that West’s free bid is not based on K, A and either the K or Q or both! So, perhaps a diamond is the best of the switches.

Yet, if partner did have K, you will always make a spade trick and if not, you might open up the diamond suit for declarer. Also, clubs look ready for discards. That therefore brings us back to what just might be declarer’s Achilles Heel. We know they have at least 5 spades but do they have one most important spade? Let’s find out!

 

The card is 10 and the answer was no! Even the singleton 10 in our partner’s hand will promote a trick for our side. West would ruff low with North playing 10. Declarer will win in dummy, cash their other spade honour and return to hand in a minor suit, say clubs. They can cash the K but their contract is not quite secure yet.

West knows you started with 7 hearts and probably 3 spades (playing a third round of hearts would make little sense if you only had 2 small spades). They have seen you produce a club. If you had two diamonds and just one club, they have to finesse the second round of clubs to make their contract.

Perhaps West should not take that line since you might have tried earlier for a club ruff if that was the case. So, they should play a second club to the king. Whenever you choose to ruff, one of the two losing diamonds will be discarded.

 

 

 

Thus, you will probably end up with -620 rather than +100 but either score is much better than the -650 that a non-ruff and sluff at trick 3 would have produced. Credit East for their two- card raise but save some match-points by restricting the damage. Promotion! A similar theme continues tomorrow.

Unsupported Aces

 

Well,as West, we led our unsupported ace against South’s 4game. North had opened 1 and South bid 1. North then bid 1NT and South closed the auction in 4.

You led A and partner encouraged, winning the second trick with 9. Next came K and Q from declarer. Over to you.

Richard Solomon

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