Contract Bridge

Cards that are seemingly unimportant insofar as making the contract is concerned are often played indiscriminately, but there are hands where very careful handling of such cards is required.

Consider this deal played some years ago by Rafael Bufill, a well-known Spanish expert. There seemed to be nothing to the play when he took West’s heart lead with the ace, but a complication arose when he cashed the king of spades and West showed out. Bufill continued with a spade to the ace, finessed the ten and then extracted East’s last trump with the queen.

At this point, the 10-8-3 of diamonds appeared to be of little consequence, since they were destined to be played on dummy’s A-K-Q. But Bufill, anticipating potential danger ahead, made the precautionary move of leading the ten toward dummy.

West followed low, and Bufill went up with the queen. This did not prove fatal, however, because he returned to his hand with a club to lead the eight of diamonds through West. West covered with the nine, taken with the king, but was helpless when Bufill next crossed to his hand with a club and led the three of diamonds toward the A-7-4-2, trapping the jack and thus making the grand slam.

Observe that South would have gone down had he made the mistake of leading the diamond three initially instead of the ten.

After West followed low and declarer put up the queen, there would have been no way to recover.

West would have covered the next diamond lead of the ten with the jack, but later would not have covered the eight with the nine, thereby blocking the suit.

It should be noted that if East had doubled seven spades to request a diamond lead (a Lightner double, asking West to lead dummy’s first-bid suit), and everyone passed, the grand slam would have been defeated.