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Sweet Smell of Success.

The success, say, of a well bid and a well- played hand. Well, when both occur together… how good is that!

 

You do rather well to bid this 6 slam. It will be even better if you win 12 tricks! West leads J. You win with A discarding a club. At trick 2, you play a small heart to your jack, with West playingT. Next comes a spade to the king and East’s A with East exiting a low club to West’s king and dummy’s ace. What now? (Both opponents will follow to the second round of spades.)

The bidding

Such hands as above are easier to bid using 2 over 1 methods where, as above, 2NT is available as a forcing response second time around. Certainly, one could use 3 as 4^th suit forcing (artificial) and that would work where South has extra shape but might be awkward for South if they had a 5422 shape hand without a diamond control (North has them!).

Once South showed 5-5 in the majors, North, with total control in the minors, used Key-Card with the presence of two being enough for an attempt at slam.

The play

You can discard one club loser on the opening diamond lead but there is no need to discard the other until they switch to a club. You do not have that many trumps that you want to afford a club ruff when they take their A .

So, play a heart to hand to lead a spade towards the king. Sometimes, defenders will take their ace early and if it was West, that would save you any ruffing issues. However, it was East who took the ace over the king to return a club. So, you can now play the second top diamond to discard your remaining small club.

A 5-1 spade break would be unwelcome and unmanageable. So, today was a good day. Both defenders followed to the Q. A 3-3 spade break would be fine and West had followed with 732 in the normal order to the three rounds of the suit. East had played A then 6. Who had T? A 4-2 break is more common than a 3-3 break but at that moment, it really was 50-50 as to who held the remaining spade.

Not a good time to lose your second trick. So, you ruff with Q and are relieved to have done so when East discards a small club.

Job done? Well, not quite.  Do you remember seeing T come from the West hand when you played that early round of trumps? What is the significance? If it is a true card, it means that that suit is breaking 4-1 and when you lead your trump now off the table, you have a finesse to take, playing East for the 9.

Did you? Well, it is one of those annoying Restricted Choice situations, though not as it so often is with the queen and the jack, but here with the 10 and the 9. Did West have to or choose to play 10?

Not a lot to help you decide except that West did have more spades than East, 4-2. So, maybe now is the hour to play a low heart to your 8 and be very pleased when West searches for a minor card to discard.

 

It’s time to claim announcing that you are drawing trumps and running the spades. Can you feel that warm feeling inside? 

It was GeO Tislevoll who had that feeling in the recent Waikato Real Bridge Teams, one of only two declarers to bid and make this slam and the only one in slam to make 12 tricks without any help from the defence.

The real GeO

Low Level Action

The bidding is still at the 1-level but there has been a bit of action. What should you do now:

 

 

You are playing a 2+ 1 opener and see the following sequence. What now?

Richard Solomon

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