ACES ON BRIDGE

“Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.”

— Stephen Leacock

In this deal, you may want to look only at the North-South cards as you try to find your way home in three no-trump.

West opens with the spade jack, which rides to your king. The bulk of your tricks will surely have to come from diamonds, a more reliable source than the threadbare hearts. Five diamond tricks will be enough to fulfill the contract, as long as you keep East off play for the killing spade continuation. However, there are entry problems caused by the diamond blockage.

Your finesse of the diamond 10 holds, and you must plan to repeat the finesse. In fact, you need two entries: one to repeat the finesse and another to reach the long card after the suit has been unblocked.You should try to establish these entries in clubs, but it appears that no approach is surefire. If you finesse the club 10, West might take the queen and shift to a heart. That would doom you as the cards lie, with the heart king offside and diamonds 3-1. Cashing the club king first would not necessarily be any better.

The solution at trick three is to run the club jack from dummy. If West takes the club queen, you can organize the two entries you need to get back to your hand from the club suit. When the club jack holds, you have an extra trick in the bag (three clubs, one spade and one heart). You can continue with the diamond ace and another diamond, taking four diamonds, three clubs and one trick in each major. If East had covered the club jack, you even would have made an overtrick.

ANSWER: Bid one no-trump. If playing twoover-one game-forcing, you do not have the values to force to game with a call of two diamonds. A direct raise to three spades (not unreasonable) would normally deliver four-card support. Assuming you have it available, start with a forcing no-trump instead. When followed by a jump in spades, it shows precisely these values.