Sometimes the contract that goes down sticks in your mind more than the one you make. Take this wildly distributional holding on Board 12 on Monday, Aug. 17, at the Bridge
Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines:
Spades: 8-7-4.
Hearts: K.
Diamonds: 2.
Clubs: A-10-9-8-7-6-5-3.
West is declarer. We're North-South. We're vulnerable. They’re not. My partner Selina has 15 high card points and opens 1 No Trump. East, Adrian Buis, has an opener too, with five cards in each of the red suits. His bid is 2 Hearts, implying a good minor suit, obviously Diamonds. Well then, 3 Clubs. After all, I have eight of them. And so it goes until they bid 5 Hearts and I take it to 6 Clubs.
We have to lose a Heart – Selina doesn't have the Ace.
Everything else looks tight, with one important exception. We're missing two of the Clubs
and one of them is the King. I lead a Club from the dummy, Adrian plays low and
I'm facing that classic quandary – is there a singleton King? Do I want to lose
a trick to it?
So I play the Ace. West is void. The rest is a
laydown. Elsewhere, two Souths guess the finesse correctly, though only one of
them bids the slam. Even so, what seems like a setback still turns out to be a bit of
a plus hand for us – 4.5 match points out of 8.
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