ACES ON BRIDGE

Against the disease of writing, one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease. — Peter Abelard

Today’s deal might appear straightforward at teams, but at matchpoints you can imagine there would be a temptation to put your contract at risk. Let’s look at teams play.You declare four hearts on the defense of repeated club leads. You ruff the second, and I assume you cash the heart ace, with both opponents following. What would you do now? No peeking at the opponents’ cards!

If trumps are 3-2, almost any approach will lead to 10 tricks. But today, if you cross to a top diamond and take the trump finesse, West will win his doubleton queen and lead a second diamond to give his partner a ruff.

So is the solution simply to cash both top trumps? Not at all, since your secondary concern should be managing a 4-1 trump break.

If you take the two top trumps and find an opponent showing out, you cannot prevent the other opponent from scoring both his small trumps, and eventually a spade as well.

So after both opponents follow to the first trump, the best line is to play a low trump from hand at trick four!

The point is that if West wins, then even when trumps are 4-1, the best he can do is play a third round of clubs. But you can simply discard a spade from hand.You can then ruff a fourth round of clubs in dummy and cross to hand with a spade to draw the remaining trumps.

While the chance of each unfriendly lie of the cards is small, why not protect against both?

ANSWER: Although you are at the lower end of the range for this call, this hand is clearly worth a raise to three clubs, a bid that is somewhere between a courtesy raise and a genuine invitation. The raise covers both hand types, but you can easily see that a hand 5-5 in the minors should offer decent play for 11 tricks.