Looking for clues in the opening leads
With few opportunities to play cards in person due to the COVID-19 pandemic, bridge players can keep their game sharp by trying out the question posed in our weekly quiz.
Here is another in the current series of quizzes on interpreting your partner’s opening leads. In the following problem, you are given the bidding, your partner’s lead and your own and the dummy’s holding in the suit led, accompanied by five card combinations your partner might hold. Taking all available information into account, which of the five combinations do you think your partner might actually be leading from?
More than one of choices could be correct.
The bidding: Opponent-1H; Partner-2D; Opponent-2H; You-Pass; Opponent-4H; All Pass. Partner leads the SK. Dummy has 954 and you have 1073. Your partnership leads the king from suits headed by the ace-king. Partner could hold: a)KQ b)KQJ c)AK6 d)KQJ82 e)KQ82.
Answer: The king would be the proper lead from all five holdings shown, but on the bidding, two of them a) and d) — should be dismissed as being unrealistic, if not impossible. Crediting partner with a) would mean placing the declarer, who opened one heart, with a five-card spade suit headed by the A-J, a holding that would be possible only if declarer had six or more hearts (with two five-card suits, or with fewer hearts than spades, opener would have bid spades first).
Similarly, if partner, who overcalled in diamonds and thereby guaranteed holding no less than five cards in that suit, also had the spade suit given in d), he would
have bid spades first in accordance with the rule stated above. The only hand with which partner could properly overcall in diamonds while holding a five-card spade suit would be one where he held six or more diamonds, and in that case, it is highly unlikely that he would have passed four hearts at his second turn and permitted the opponents to buy that contract uncontested.
Instead, he would almost certainly have bid four spades, asking you to choose between spades and diamonds, with an eye toward either making a game your way or finding a profitable sacrifice against the opponents’ game.