ACES ON BRIDGE

Someone once made the point to me that it isn’t the disasters one experiences at the table that lead to the partnership break-ups; it is the postmortems. Today’s deal from a teams game produced an example of precisely how not to gain friends and influence people.

In one room, against four spades, West led the heart queen. When there is a singleton in dummy, many use third hand’s card as suit preference rather than length-showing or attitude, though this is very much a matter for partnership agreement. When East contributed the nine under the queen, West continued with a low diamond. East rose with the ace and played back the two. Declarer played low, the king won, and it was all over for the defense.

In the other room, East thought more deeply and realized that the first diamond lead must come from the East hand. So East overtook his partner’s heart queen at trick one and returned the diamond jack — surrounding North’s 10. It should not have mattered what South did; he was well on his way to losing three diamond tricks. However, when East returned the jack, South covered with the queen without a care in the world. West put on the king, and then ... switched to a club.

When they scored up the deal as a flat board, East, who had shown remarkable self-control until that point, asked his partner why he had shifted, and received the aggravating response that he didn’t think his partner was aware of the existence of that play.

ANSWER: You may not be able to justify this on high cards alone, but I would certainly feel sympathetic to a jump to three spades rather than a simple call of two spades. Since you plan to compete to three spades if necessary, and you have a great hand on offense compared to defense, why not use up that extra round of bidding at once?

“Never apologize, mister; it’s a sign of weakness.” — John Wayne