ACES ON BRIDGE

“Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.”

— Peter Ustinov

With no scientific route available, South invites a slam by leaping to five spades, trying to show a hand too good to sign off in four spades. North accepts because of his excellent controls, despite not having much to spare in high cards, and West leads the diamond king. How would you play the contract?

Say you win the diamond lead in dummy, ditching a club. You have five side-suit winners and will make the slam if you can add seven trump tricks. You carefully ruff a diamond at trick two and cash the spade ace, hoping for a 2-2 trump break. Not today, as West discards a diamond.

With a wealth of entries to dummy, your only hope is to continue to score your low trumps: heart ace, diamond ruff, heart king, heart ruff, club ace and heart ruff. You cross to dummy with the club king in the three-card ending, left with the spade king-10 and a losing club in hand.

Finally, when you lead dummy’s diamond, East cannot prevent you from scoring your spade 10. His best play is to ruff high, but you discard your club and finesse on East’s forced trump return.

The play may have looked easy, but there was a pitfall to be avoided. If you take a third diamond ruff too early, East gets the chance to discard the second of his three clubs. If you had not used both club entries by this stage, you would lose one of your club winners. Instead, by ruffing two hearts before the final diamond, you prevent East from making a damaging discard.

ANSWER: Bid four spades. Preempt to the limit with such excellent spades and great shape. If you force the opponents to guess often enough, they are bound to go wrong a fair amount of the time. This would be even clearer with hearts instead of spades, where you want to keep the opponents out or force them to commit themselves.