Goren Bridge
Bob Jones
| Dlr: South | ♠ A J 10 7 6 | |||||||||||||
| Vul: N-S | ♥ K 10 8 4 | |||||||||||||
| ♦ 9 7 | ||||||||||||||
| ♣ 9 6 | ||||||||||||||
| ♠ — | ♠ Q 9 8 3 | |||||||||||||
| ♥ J 9 7 3 2 | ♥ — | |||||||||||||
| ♦ K J 4 2 | ♦ Q 10 8 3 | |||||||||||||
| ♣ J 8 7 2 | ♣ Q 10 4 3 | |||||||||||||
| ♠ 5 4 2 | ||||||||||||||
| ♥ A Q 6 5 | ||||||||||||||
| ♦ A 6 5 | ||||||||||||||
| ♣ A K 5 | ||||||||||||||
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Opening lead: ♣2
Today’s deal features Tony Duh, an expert from Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), who was sitting South. The 4♥ contract was quite normal, and it would produce an overtrick or two on most days. The 5-0 trump split made this a hard one to handle.
Duh won the opening club lead with his ace. He reasoned that it would do no harm to start on spades before drawing trumps, so he led a low spade toward the dummy. He was surprised when West discarded a diamond, but he won the trick with dummy’s ♠A.
The bad split in spades warned of a possible bad split in hearts, so Duh led a club to his king and ruffed a club in dummy. A diamond to his ace was followed by a low spade. East won with his queen, cashed the king, and continued with another spade. Duh ruffed with the ♥A and West was down to his five trumps. When Duh led a low diamond, West was forced to ruff and lead a trump to dummy’s eight. Duh ruffed dummy’s last spade with the ♥Q and took the last two tricks with dummy’s ♥K 10. Well played!
West would have defeated the contract had he ruffed the spade at trick two and led a heart. That is almost impossible to see and was only noticed in the post-mortem discussion.