ACES ON BRIDGE

“Never let the future disturb you.You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”

— Marcus Aurelius

For our final par deal, put yourself in East’s shoes as you defend against this small slam contract.

When North makes a simple raise of spades, he shows a little something along the way, as he did not simply jump to game in a forcing auction. Accordingly, South drives to six spades after asking for key-cards and receiving a response that shows one. West leads the heart queen to your ace, dropping declarer’s king. What now?

It is clear that declarer does not have any more top losers. If you have a diamond trick coming, you need not do a thing, other than make sure you do not throw your trick away. However, if your partner has a slow club winner while declarer holds a singleton diamond, you may have to defend actively to prevent declarer from establishing dummy’s long diamond for a discard. Those trumps in dummy will certainly provide three entries to the North hand if South needs them after all.

Accordingly, you should shift to a spade at the second trick, extracting an entry from dummy prematurely, before declarer has managed to ruff a diamond. Now South can ruff only two diamonds. When the king and jack fail to drop, he cashes the club ace, crosses to dummy with a spade and falls back on the club finesse. When it fails, he is down one.

If East were to return any other suit, declarer could ruff out the defenders’ diamonds, using the diamond ace and two trumps to get there. He could then employ the third trump as a reentry to the established long card.

ANSWER: Despite having fewer than the traditional 6 high-card points, you ought to keep the bidding open with a one-notrump response. You could easily be making a game if partner has a heart fit, and heavy openings are all the rage.You hope to find a better resting place than spades, and if partner has a second suit, it should play better than one spade.