ACES ON BRIDGE

“Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery, because we have ... the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality ... which, from time to time, reveals itself to be vain and illusory.”

— Luigi Pirandello

At the Bermuda Bowl in Shanghai in in 2007, the end of the round-robin match between USA1 and Norway featured two good reporting opportunities for the assembled reporters.

In the first, North felt his hand was far too strong to splinter in spades at his first turn, so he jumped in his side suit, then decided to bid slam over the valueshowing rebid by his partner.

As you can see, despite the 4-1 trump break, six hearts is cold because the club king is onside. Say West leads a diamond. Declarer can win the ace, draw two rounds of trumps to uncover the split, ruff a diamond and throw two diamonds from dummy on the high spades. Then he finesses the club jack, ruffs another diamond to hand and repeats the club finesse. That produces 12 tricks; two of dummy’s four diamonds are ruffed in South, and two pitched on the winning spades.

However, Tor Helness (West) had his own idea about that. He gave declarer a difficult guess when he led the club five! After much internal cogitation, declarer went up with the club ace, and down went the contract. Only the bad trump break would have defeated him, so it is hard to criticize him unduly. Although the Norwegian North-South failed to derive the maximum benefit from their teammate’s excellent lead, as they had rested in game, Norway still picked up 11 IMPs.

ANSWER: Two hearts. You must force to game, and the most economical way to start getting your values across is with a twoheart reverse. To jump to three clubs would take up too much space and perhaps lose the heart suit. If partner bids three clubs over two hearts, you can raise to four clubs. This gets your shape across — though at the risk of going past three no-trump.