Contract Bridge

Famous Hand

It is often difficult to reach the best contract when your opponents cramp the bidding space with nuisance bids. However, such tactics occasionally boomerang, which is what happened on this deal from the 1966 World Pair Championship when a Spanish pair crossed swords with a French pair.

The Spanish South opened the bidding with one heart, and the French West overcalled with one notrump! This type of overcall — indicating a long suit and a weak hand — is known in France as the comic notrump (le sans atout comique). North doubled to show a good hand, and East added spice to the goings-on by leaping to five clubs.

South bid five hearts, thus indicating much more than a minimum opening bid, and North raised him to six. Perhaps East should have passed — the bidding surely would have died then and there — but he bid seven clubs as a sacrifice against the small slam he felt sure the opponents could make.

This tactic backfired when it gave South a chance to make a forcing pass and in that way invite partner to go on to seven hearts with a suitable hand. Had South held a weaker hand, he would have doubled to stop his partner from bidding a grand slam.

Under the circumstances, North had no real problem. He realized that his three aces were exactly the kind of medicine South needed for a grand slam. So he bid seven hearts, which was easily made for a score of 2,210 points, and the comic notrump did not prove to be so comical after all.