Hand of the day #865
The Aces On Bridge by Bobby Wolff Opening Lead: ♦Q In today's deal it is uncl...
The Aces On Bridge by Bobby Wolff
Both teams declared four spades, but at one table it was played by North. Despite his partner’s overcall, East thought it might be a good idea to lead from his club sequence. He knows better now!
Opening Lead: ♥K
Declarer simply won in dummy and led a spade to his hand, then crossed back to dummy with a diamond to play a second spade. He made 10 tricks with the minimum of fuss.
Where the auction was as shown, North-South were playing transfers after intervention, so had an artificial way to show spades after the one-heart overcall. That put West, Bruce Neill, on lead, and when he saw dummy hit with a full opening bid, he decided his best chance to set the game was to find his partner with the spade jack. He pressed on with two more rounds of hearts, letting South win dummy’s heart queen and lead a club to hand to play a spade up. Neill hopped up with the ace and played a fourth heart, leaving declarer to guess whether to ruff high and try to drop the spade jack, or whether to discard from dummy in the hope that West had the spade jack. He guessed wrong — and regardless of whether he followed the percentage line or not, I think West deserved to set the game because he had at least given declarer the chance to go wrong.
Bid with the aces
Answer: 3♣
You have no easy way to show your invitational values and no guaranteed fit. You are too good for a simple club preference, so the choice is to rebid three diamonds (promising a six-card suit) or to jump to three clubs. The latter would be my choice, since my partner’s one-spade rebid over one diamond strongly suggested an unbalanced hand. He would have rebid one no-trump if balanced.
This Hand of the Day was originally published on aces.bridgeblogging.com.