ACES ON BRIDGE

The truth which (scientific thought) arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear.

— William Kingdon Clifford In this deal from an international match point pairs competition, East’s light opening bid helped guide the way for declarer.

At his second turn, North doubled West’s two-diamond call for takeout and then drove to the heart game. With a singleton on the side, North reasoned that the fit of the hands was more important than the raw high-card strength.

West led the spade seven to East’s ace, and back came a spade to South’s king. Now declarer could be sure spades were 5-2. If he lost the trump finesse to East, West would ruff the third spade. Declarer would therefore need to guess the hearts at once (if indeed they could be guessed).

South cashed three rounds of clubs instead, to dispose of his high spade.

This way, he could avoid conceding a spade ruff to one of West’s small trumps, assuming the clubs stood up. Even if East ruffed in, declarer might get a handle on how to play trumps later.

In fact, it was West who ruffed the third club.

West tried a diamond now, but South won cheaply to lead a low heart from hand.

When West followed with a small card, declarer knew to put up the king rather than finessing West for the heart queen. The point was that if West had started with queen-third of trumps, the contract was always going down, with East poised to take the heart ace and lead a third spade for West to overruff declarer.

Had declarer taken the apparently natural line of running the heart seven at trick three, the defense would have prevailed.

ANSWER: I would bid one heart over one club, but here, with two stoppers in their suit and a poor heart holding, I would be happy to get my hand off my chest with a one-no-trump overcall. Note that in this particular example, if they were to open one spade, an overcall in hearts at the two-level would be verboten on such a feeble suit.