ACES ON BRIDGE

“What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?”

-- Sydney Smith

With four-card trump support, do you always respond to a major suit transfer request at the lowest level, or do you break the transfer? Here, North-South took a simple route to game after a transfer break, and declarer won the spade queen with dummy’s ace, then drew trumps.

The contract appears to hinge on finding the club queen onside, but South found an extra chance when he immediately tried a low diamond toward dummy. As no honor appeared from West, declarer tried the effect of inserting the eight. When that forced East’s king, declarer was home. A low spade from East to West’s 10 was followed by the club 10. South won, then led the diamond queen to knock out the defense’s diamond ace. At that point, South had established two winners in his hand on which to discard dummy’s losing clubs.

Declarer’s diamond play looks illogical, as if he were creating an extra loser for himself, but in practice his maneuver was relatively unlikely to cost, since he was going to have two top losers in the diamond suit anyway, no matter what he did. Had the diamond eight lost to the nine, South still would have lost only two diamond tricks, and there was always the club finesse in reserve.

Notice that East could not have both high diamonds as well as the club queen -- if he did, given that he also held the spade king, he surely would have opened. So leading to the diamond eight was very unlikely to forfeit a legitimate play for the contract.

ANSWER: The question is whether to correct to two hearts when partner has suggested a balanced hand. The 5-4 shape (and shortage in the major partner is unlikely to have length in) makes a two-heart call reasonable. I wouldn’t hesitate to make that call if my heart nine were the 10. With that, even facing two small hearts, I would have some guarantee that the heart fit would be relatively solid.