Bridge

Just plain horse sense

Opening lead — nine of diamonds.

Bridge is an easy game — if you always make the right bid and the right play at the right time. Thankfully, the right bids and plays are usually easy to find, though some of them might be a bit harder to find than others.

Take this deal played by Emma Jean Hawes in a national pairs championship many years ago. She got to four hearts as shown, and all she did was do the right thing every time it was her turn. But what she did must have been very, very good, because all of the others who played the hand either failed to reach four hearts or failed to make it.

West led a diamond, and Hawes made her first good play when she won the trick in her hand instead of in dummy. She had already determined the proper line of play, which necessitated taking the first trick with the diamond queen. Next she drew three rounds of trump, led a spade and finessed the nine! Why the nine? We’ll come back to that in a moment.

East took the nine with the queen and played the A-K-Q of clubs. Hawes ruffed, led a diamond to the king and returned the king of spades. East covered with the ace, establishing dummy’s jack, after which Hawes crossed to dummy’s diamond ace and discarded her remaining diamond on dummy’s jack of spades to make her contract.

The unusually deep spade finesse at trick two was prompted by East’s one-trump overcall, which indicated 16 to 18 points and thus marked East with the A-Q of spades. Playing the jack or king from dummy was therefore pointless, while playing the nine could be very productive if West had the ten.