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The Aces On Bridge by Bobby Wolff
Opening Lead: ♣Q
When missing five trumps, you will find they break 4-1 more than one quarter of the time. So planning against that is generally not a waste of effort.
In today’s deal, had North’s spade 10 been the queen, a small slam in spades would have been a reasonable contract. However, even four spades was not laydown when West led the club queen and continued with the jack. South ruffed, then laid down the spade ace and king, discovering the 4-1 break. Belatedly, declarer started on hearts, but West ruffed the first round with the trump jack and cashed the queen, which removed South’s last trump, with the club 10 representing one down.
Unless you have total trump control — and sometimes even then — it is more often right than not to establish your second suit before drawing too many trumps. If at trick four, having drawn just one round of trumps, declarer had played the heart ace, West’s ruff would not have fazed him. South trumps the club return, cashes the trump king, then continues with hearts from the top. West can trump in with the master spade, but that is the last trick for the defense. A club return is ruffed with dummy’s penultimate trump, and the diamond entries allow declarer to ruff out hearts, then come back to hand to run the suit.
Even if hearts were not 4-0, this would be the best line — either a defender would ruff in, leaving declarer with trump control, or dummy’s third club could be discarded on the hearts.
Bid with the aces
Answer: 3♣
It looks natural to invite game with a cue-bid raise of two spades. But my preference as a passed hand would be to jump to three clubs, a fit-showing jump to indicate my source of tricks and to help my partner work out how far to compete against the opponents' spade bids. Incidentally, this hand is not worth a splinter bid in spades facing a third-in-hand opening.
This Hand of the Day was originally published on aces.bridgeblogging.com.
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