ACES ON BRIDGE
“Another thing that makes error popular is that we like life to be nice and simple. Of course, life isn’t like that; it’s complex, irregular, hard to understand, and generally a messy thing to deal with. But error has a wonderful neatness.”
— Rudolf Flesch
This week’s deals were played in the final of the 2022 England mixed team national trials. Due to COVID concerns, the event was conducted digitally at RealBridge.online.
South’s strong no-trump call was exceptionally ill-judged. Hands with 4-4-4-1 shape can be difficult to bid, but here only a response of one no-trump would have been awkward.
West kicked off with the club queen, East letting that hold in case his partner held queen-jack-fourth. The club continuation went to East’s king, followed by the club ace as West dropped the jack, a suit-preference signal for spades. However, East had seen declarer discard two hearts on the clubs, so he decided to shift to that suit instead, giving South a much-needed tempo. How would you proceed from here, in declarer’s position?
South laid down the diamond ace, a natural-looking move that had only an overtrick to gain. It cost the contract here, though, as East could hold up twice in the diamond suit, stranding the 13th diamond in dummy. Declarer was thus limited to six tricks.
It would have been better to lead a low diamond from hand initially. Only a 4-0 split represented a danger to the contract, and by playing low to one of dummy’s honors, declarer would give East a dilemma: Win and free up the fifth diamond, or duck and see declarer lead the other honor from dummy, catching the king. This would not work against king-fourth in the West hand, but in that situation no other line would fare any better.
ANSWER: Lead the heart six. When you have such length in hearts and the hand on your right is short, a heart lead is relatively unlikely to give anything away (unless your opponents have both top hearts). A spade could easily cost a trick, while a diamond certainly does not appeal. West has shown length in both minors, after all.