BRIDGE

Here is a neat hand, similar in principle to one of the hands in yesterday’s column, played by Bruce Bell, New Zealand expert. It features a rare sequence of plays that led to a most unusual ending. West led a diamond against six hearts, and Bell had to choose between two methods of play. He could try to ruff spades in dummy, which seemed likely to leave him short of his goal, or he could attempt a dummy reversal, which would require little more than a 3-2 trump division. Bell selected the latter approach and made the slam as a result. The principle underlying a dummy reversal is that declarer uses his own trumps to ruff dummy’s losers, instead of using dummy’s trumps to ruff his losers. Properly executed, a dummy reversal produces more trump tricks than declarer would normally be able to make. Bell ruffed West’s king-of-diamonds lead, played a heart to the queen, ruffed another diamond, led a heart to the king and ruffed a third diamond. Having exhausted the trumps in his own hand, he next led the jack of clubs to the queen. Then he cashed the ace of trumps and ace of diamonds, on which he discarded the A-K of clubs! After unblocking the clubs with these discards, Bell was able to cash the 10-9-8 of clubs to bring himself to 11 tricks, and the ace of spades accounted for the slam-going trick. In all, Bell scored four clubs, the ace of diamonds, the ace of spades and six trump tricks to escape what appeared to be certain