Contract Bridge

The Case Of The Missing Damsel

If you and your partner agree that certain bids show certain types of hands, you will naturally understand each other better in a great many situations.

But it’s also true that your opponents, who are entitled to know as much about your methods as you do, can occasionally put this knowledge to deadly use against you.

Consider today’s case where declarer profited greatly from information acquired during both the bidding and play. East, playing 13-to-15-point opening notrumps, bid one notrump, after which North-South quickly arrived at four hearts.

West led a spade, and East’s ten forced the ace. Declarer returned the queen of trump, taken by East with the ace. East then played the king of clubs, queen of spades and ace of clubs in that order. South ruffed, cashed the jack of trump, ruffed a spade in dummy and was then faced with the critical problem of which way to take the two-way diamond finesse.

You might think that declarer would assume that East, who opened one notrump, must have the diamond queen and would finesse accordingly. But South did not fall into this trap.

East had already shown up with the Q-J-10 of spades, ace of hearts and A-K of clubs — a total of 14 points. Declarer was thus able to deduce that East could not have the queen of diamonds for his 13-to-15-point notrump opening.

South therefore took the diamond finesse through West, and as a result made four hearts. East had unintentionally let the cat out of the bag by innocently opening with one notrump.