The Aces on Bridge: Monday, March 16, 2009

Dealer: North Vul: E/W		North
		♠	A K 9 8
		♥	7 6 3 2
		♦	J 8 4 2
		♣	9
West				East
♠	7 6 4			♠	J
♥	A Q 5 4			♥	10 9 8
♦	Q 6			♦	A K 7 5
♣	10 7 4 2			♣	A K J 6 3
		South
		♠	Q 10 5 3 2
		♥	K J
		♦	10 9 3
		♣	Q 8 5

West	North	East	South
	Pass	1♦	1♠
Dbl.	2♦	3♣	Pass
Pass	3♠	All Pass

Opening Lead: ♦Q

“None but the brave deserves the fair.”

— John Dryden

To mark the Spring Nationals now being held in Houston, I shall be using deals from last year’s spring tournament, which was held in Detroit. You can follow the tournament by reading the bulletins on the ACBL Web site at acbl.org, or watching live coverage toward the end of the week at bridgebase.com.

The best play that I encountered in the Mixed Pairs found me on the receiving end. I thought Michael Yuen and Angela Fenton did very well here.

My one-spade bid perhaps deserved a fate worse than it got. But given that the contract of three clubs would have produced an easy 150 for East-West, the defenders needed the third undertrick to get back to par.

Against three spades, West led the diamond queen, ducked all around, and led another diamond to East’s king. Yuen made a very thoughtful shift to the heart eight, covered by the jack and queen. (Shifting to the heart 10 would not have made West’s life easy.)

Now the heart ace was led, East playing the nine. Then Fenton played a club to the king, and East continued with the diamond ace and a fourth diamond. Declarer ruffed high as Fenton pitched both her hearts. Now, as declarer, I had to guess spades at once, with no re-entry to my hand. Not surprisingly, I led low to dummy’s spade eight, since the trumps were known to be 3-1. This resulted in down 150 — mission accomplished for the defenders.

LEAD WITH THE ACES

South Holds:

If you would like to contact Bobby Wolff, feel free to leave a comment at this blog. Reproduced with permission of United Feature Syndicate, Inc., Copyright 2009.