The Aces On Bridge by Bobby Wolff
Opening Lead: ♣7
The NEC tournament in Yokohama is now one of the strongest and best established invitational team events in the world. After an initial Swiss format, the top eight teams go through to a knockout phase. Today's deal (and indeed all this week's deals) comes from the later stages of last April's event.
Both Wests in our featured match led a club against three no-trump. David Bakhshi led the seven, and East won cheaply and continued the suit. Declarer won in dummy perforce (Bakhshi helpfully following with the eight to suggest spade values whereas his opposite number was not so generous). Both declarers now led a low diamond to the jack and a diamond back to the queen.
The unsuccessful defender — East — now shifted to a heart (perhaps playing partner for the spade ace and heart king) and declarer claimed 600, while Bakhshi’s partner ,David Gold, unblocked his club honor, on which his partner played his highest missing club spot, then shifted to spades for three down.
Gold’s defense was right in theory as well as in practice, but Bakhshi’s suit-preference signal at trick two had made his partner’s life far easier. The general rule is that when a defender has a choice of irrelevant small cards or when he knows that his partner knows exactly what his holding is, he should try to give his partner a suit-preference signal, as here. In virtually every deal the defenders have a chance to signal suit-preference — even if in practice they rarely do so.
Bid with the aces
Answer: 5♠
Your partner's jump to four hearts is a splinter bid, agreeing spades and showing short hearts. You would like to bid Blackwood — but how do you know partner has a club control? Best now is to jump to five spades, which focuses on control in the danger suit, clubs. Partner will bid slam with second-round control or better, and pass without a control.
This Hand of the Day was originally published on aces.bridgeblogging.com.
