ACES ON BRIDGE

“A throw of the dice will never abolish chance.”

-- Stéphane Mallarmé

This deal was played in the Pairs Championships at Ostend last summer. The deal does not exemplify any great technical theme, but it was so much fun for the defenders that I thought it worthwhile to show my readers.

If you focus solely on the North and South cards, you would expect North to open a strong no-trump and be transferred into two spades. You’d expect declarer to bring home his contract unless trumps were hostile. In fact, the spades are quite friendly, but things did not work out as expected.

Where Waseem Naqvi and Lee Rosenthal were defending, they pushed their opponents to the three-level, then showed how to maximize their trump holdings.

Rosenthal, West, started with the diamond ace, continuing with a diamond to Naqvi’s jack. Naqvi switched to his singleton club, then took a club ruff to play back a diamond. Declarer ruffed optimistically with the spade eight, overruffed by Rosenthal with the nine. A third round of clubs was ruffed with the spade king and overruffed by East with the ace.

Now Naqvi played another diamond, and declarer had to decide if the remaining spades were as in the diagram or the other way around. When he guessed wrong by ruffing with the spade 10, it was overruffed by the jack. Now a fourth round of clubs promoted Naqvi’s spade seven. The defense was finally out of ammunition, but they had made all five of their trumps for four down, and virtually all the matchpoints.

ANSWER: If you trust your partner to deliver the right shape for his takeout double, you should compete to two spades now. Yes, partner does not rate to have four spades unless he is very minimum, but he could easily be suitable for spades while holding only three trumps. More to the point, when each side has at least an eight-card fit, don’t give up too early.