BRIDGE

Defending without the use of count signals can be compared to playing cards while wearing a blindfold.

For this deal, East did his very best to help his partner count what needed to be counted but a self-imposed blindfold led to a much happier result for the offense than for East-West.

West’s double of the highlevel intervention was one of those “value” doubles often favoured by experts: “Partner I have lots of points, do you want to defend or bid on?”.

With his balanced min- imum, East wisely chose defense (any five-level contract his side might have reached was slated for down two). The defenders got off to a great start with West’s diamond lead to his partner’s Jack for a well-judged trump shift.

Declarer won in dummy to play a second diamond to East’s Queen for a second round of trumps, again won in dummy, this time for a diamond ruff in the closed hand as West pitched one heart and one club.

And then a parade of trumps, lots and lots of trumps. At the start of the spade parade, West let go of one card in each of his long suits and then had to decide on one more discard.

After consulting everything but what he should have, he finally discarded one more heart and ace and another of that suit soon showed him the error of his ways.

How to avoid this disaster? For his first two discards, East had played the six and three of clubs in that order, count signals to show an even number of cards (four) in the suit and mark South with a singleton. West saves hearts and South goes down!