The Aces On Bridge by Bobby Wolff
Opening Lead: ♠6
At the Yeh Bros. tournament, this was the first board of the second half of the knockout match between The Netherlands and Australia Youth. The Australian juniors are one of the strongest young teams in the world, and although they lost to the then world champions, they were not disgraced.
For the Dutch, Ricco van Prooijen, West, led the spade six against Liam Milne’s three-no-trump contract, the seven winning in dummy. Next, Milne led a club to the queen and king (yes, setting up spade or heart tricks might have been a perfectly reasonable alternative) and now van Prooijen switched to the heart king. What, you may ask, was he thinking? Well, you will have to wait and see.
In retrospect it might have been better to duck this trick, but Milne made the natural play when he took the trick with his ace and led a spade. Van Prooijen took his ace and switched to the club 10, Louk Verhees overtaking with the jack. Milne ducked, so Verhees continued with the club nine to dummy’s ace, pinning declarer’s eight, and setting up his seven. Now the foresight of the heart king shift revealed itself. Verhees had a club winner ready to cash, and, because of van Prooijen’s earlier play, had the heart queen as an entry to cash it. Maybe this is why Milne should have ducked the heart king and taken the finesse for the queen later, but that is a lot easier to see with a view of all 52 cards.
Bid with the aces
Answer: 2NT
For better or worse, I would play pass here as prepared to play two hearts redoubled, so I must bid with this hand. However, rather than pick a minor and guess unluckily, the best option is to bid two no-trump, which is a way to show a two-suited hand in clubs and diamonds since you would bid spades if you could, or a minor if you had a single-suit. So this asks partner to take his pick of the minors.
This Hand of the Day was originally published on aces.bridgeblogging.com.
