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The Aces On Bridge by Bobby Wolff

Opening Lead: ♣5

Senior Trials were held to select the two American teams to go to Veldhoven. Today we shall see Peter Weichsel at the helm, rescuing his team. This deal occurred in the last set of a match that went to overtime and that Peter's team dragged out of the fire. So this board was critical. In the other room Peter's teammates had defended against four spades. Hemant Lall had balanced with a three-spade bid over a three-heart pre-empt and had been raised to game. There was nothing to the play; declarer lost just two trump tricks and collected 650.

The auction from our featured room was as shown. When Weichsel bid three no-trump over three spades, his partner, Mark Lair, quite reasonably passed, and Bob Hamman on lead selected a low club, an incisive shot. Weichsel won in dummy, led a spade to the nine and queen, won the club return, then tested spades and found the bad news.

Declarer now cashed off four rounds of diamonds ending in dummy and was up to seven tricks. Since West had a fistful of black-suit winners and was known to have begun with a singleton heart, what distribution should declarer play for? A singleton heart honor would have been useless to him, so declarer played a low heart from dummy, and when Bart Bramley correctly played low, Weichsel put in the 10! That was his ninth trick, and it kept his side in the hunt.

Bid with the aces

This Hand of the Day was originally published on aces.bridgeblogging.com.

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