Contract Bridge

When Sylvia first joined the club, she made it a point to always play in the expert game. Sylvia wanted to improve her game as quickly as possible, and she decided the best way to do this was to play with and against the best players in the club.

More often than not, this turned out to be more of a learning experience for her partners than it was for Sylvia. Try as they might to teach her the finer points, their efforts did not seem to help at all, since the peculiar workings of Sylvia’s mind were impossible to fathom. Invariably, she either misunderstood or misapplied the advice offered by her distraught partners. Sylvia’s one saving grace was that occasionally, when she tried to apply a principle that had been drummed into her, she would serendipitously achieve a stunning triumph as a result of her misapplication of the principle.

Consider this deal where West led the ten of hearts against Sylvia’s three-notrump contract. After dummy and East followed low, Sylvia, sitting South, also followed low! Undoubtedly, she was applying her own version of the holdup play that she had been told was so advantageous at notrump!

The extraordinary effect of this play was that, even though Sylvia could no longer make a heart trick, she could not be stopped from making the contract with an overtrick. But had she won the first heart with the queen and attempted a club finesse, as most players would have done, she would have gone down two.

Tomorrow: Believe it or not!