ACES ON BRIDGE

All the boards this week come from the 2017 Yeh Bros Cup, which is surely the strongest invitational teams event in the world.

The tournament is sponsored by Chen Yeh, who has set up an event that attracts the best teams in the world with generous sponsorship and excellent organization.

Today’s deal comes from a match where neither NorthSouth pair could reach the ideal contract. It was up to the defenders to make them pay. If you want to put yourself in the hot seat, look only at the North and East cards.

The eventual winners of the teams event, Eric Kokish and Fred Gitelman, could not get to three no-trump after a strong club sequence where West had bid diamonds, and neither player could identify the halfstopper in diamonds opposite. The other room failed to do so on a natural auction.

Both Wests astutely led diamonds. Both Easts won with their aces and needed to put West in at once to allow him to cash the second diamond winner. In the match we are focusing on, one defender switched to a heart, while the successful defender, Huub Bertens played a spade, declarer’s suit. The spade shift is right both in theory and in practice. Yes, declarer could hold five solid spades and a singleton heart — but then the losers don’t go away from dummy, do they? It is the discard from declarer’s hand that East has to worry about; if declarer has the heart ace, that is a real possibility.