Not 52 cards but 52 crosswords

Ten years after the original, Jeff Chen has produced “Bridge Crossword 2” (Master Point Press).

There are 52 crosswords (of course!), all with bridge themes and grouped by complexity. They vary from Easy (think Monday New York Times level) to Medium to Hard.

These are fun to do, Chen being a class compiler. But bridge only appears in the clues and lights (answers). When I edited “Bridge Magazine” in England, I asked Araucaria (who was a creative cryptic crossword compiler) for some that generated bridge problems. As there are a limited number of words that begin or end in “x,” he only produced a few. One generated today’s deal. How should South play in three no-trump after West leads his fourth-highest spade?

In Araucaria’s crosswords, the defenders’ hands only came with the solution. Note that he took all of the 10s (Ts) for North-South to reduce the number of x’s.

South has eight top tricks: one spade, four hearts and three clubs. If the club jack is at most doubleton, or the suit is splitting 3-3, there won’t be a problem. But what if an opponent has jack-fourth?

Then declarer can drive out the diamond ace, but that won’t work well if the opponents can take one diamond and four spades. To do that, though, the spades must be 5-2, not 4-3. Will West have all three spade honors? No, because he would have

led the king. So East presumptively has honor-doubleton.

South must win the first trick with dummy’s ace. Then he tests clubs before turning to diamonds. Here, he loses only two spades, one diamond

and one club.