Contract Bridge

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

If you make it a practice to play your cards well — even in relatively unimportant situations — you will in the process increase your chances of playing the cards well when it really matters.

Take this case from a rubber-bridge game where you’re in four spades and West leads a diamond. There seems to be nothing to the play; apparently you’ll make 11 tricks, neither more nor less. But as the play progresses, making 12 tricks becomes a real possibility. While it is granted that this is not an earthshaking development, you’ll have something to talk about if you can accomplish the feat.

After taking the diamond lead with the ace and drawing two rounds of trump, you play the king of diamonds and ruff a diamond. To your surprise, you learn that West started with seven diamonds. Moreover, when you next play the A-K-Q of hearts, discarding a club, West follows suit each time, and when you then lead the four of hearts, East discards a club.

All of this enables you to determine that West started with precisely two spades, four hearts and seven diamonds, so he simply can’t have a club!

This knowledge of West’s hand would ordinarily be useless — something like knowing that the square root of 998,001 is 999. But here you can take advantage of what you’ve learned by simply discarding your jack of clubs on the four of hearts!

This leaves West in an untenable position. He wins the heart with the jack, but because all his remaining cards are diamonds, he must lead one. You ruff in dummy, discarding your queen of clubs, and wind up making 12 tricks instead of the 11 you had counted at the start.

At rubber bridge, this extra trick might not matter very much to you, but keeping in practice on hands like this one will serve you well when a more pressing need for such an effort comes along.