Event 3 - Match 3 - Board 4

Board 4
Both sides vulnerable

♠ A 6 4 ♥ 4 3 ♦ 8 6 4 ♣ A K Q 10 3

RHO opens one heart in third seat. I can double or I can overcall two clubs. Two clubs can make it a little harder to find a spade fit, but double leaves the main feature of my hand on the shelf. Two clubs also makes it easier for me to reenter the auction if the bidding dies at a low level. Suppose, for example, I double and the auction continues two hearts--pass--pass back to me. Now what? I'm not comfortable selling out. But three clubs would show a considerably better hand than I have. If I bid clubs first, however, I can compete with a re-opening double.

I bid two clubs. LHO bids two hearts, and partner bids three clubs. RHO bids three hearts. I pass, and LHO goes on to four hearts. I guess three hearts was invitational. Not many pairs play that way.

In some partnerships, I could lead the club queen to request count at trick one. Jack doesn't play that convention, however, so I lead the club ace.

	NORTH Nathanial ♠ K J 10 9 ♥ Q 9 8 2 ♦ 7 5 ♣ J 6 2
WEST Phillip ♠ A 6 4 ♥ 4 3 ♦ 8 6 4 ♣ A K Q 10 3

West	North	East	South
Phillip	Nathanial	Jack	Marcus
	Pass	Pass	1 ♥
2 ♣	2 ♥	3 ♣	3 ♥
Pass	4 ♥	(All pass)

Partner plays the four; declarer, the nine. If a second club is cashing, I need one trick from partner. If he has a trump trick, the diamond ace, or the queen of spades (doubleton or third), there is nothing I need to do. But if he has king-queen of diamonds, I may need to switch to a diamond before my spade ace is knocked out.

If the second club isn't cashing, I need two tricks from partner. In that case, I may need to go after a spade ruff. If partner has a doubleton spade and the trump ace, I need to switch to a spade at trick two.

I was right that what I needed was a count signal. If declarer has two clubs, my best defense is (A) to cash the second club and play a diamond. If he has a singleton club, my best defense is (B) to play a low spade. Note that an obvious-shift attitude signal would not help. Partner, not knowing he needs two diamond honors for a shift to be productive, would discourage any time he has the king or queen. This would work just fine if I had a diamond honor too. Then I could adopt (A) if partner discourages and (B) if he doesn't. But, with the hand I hold, an attitude signal does not tell me what I need to know.

Jack's I-don't-have-a-club-honor signal, as usual, is no help at all. So I must simply choose the defense that works most often. For (A) to be right, I need declarer to have a doubleton club. Less obviously, I need him to have six hearts, If he has only five, he doesn't have enough pitches to get rid of all his diamonds, and there is no need for a diamond switch. That means declarer must be x-6-y-2. For (B) to be right, I need declarer to have a singleton club,and I need partner to have a doubleton spade and a doubleton ace of hearts. That gives declarer specifically 4-5-3-1.

Since (B) requires declarer to have a specific pattern and (A) requires a range of patterns, (A) is more likely to be right. It may appear that the high-card constraints counterbalanace that. (B) requires partner to have one high card (the heart ace) while (A) requires partner to have two (the king and queen of diamonds). But that's an illusion. Partner has more diamonds than hearts, so he is more likely to hold diamond honors than to hold heart honors. I won't bore you with the calculations. But it turns out partner is actually more likely to hold the king-queen of diamonds than to hold the heart ace. So (A) is a standout, at least on an a priori basis.

Of course, I've completely ignored the fact that South chose to bid three hearts over three clubs. Does the three heart bid itself suggest a singleton club? If I adopt (A), I'm playing declarer for something like

♠ Q x ♥ A K J x x x ♦ A x x ♣ x x

Three hearts would make more sense if it were competitive rather than invitational. But I don't see any reason that hand is any less likely than, say,

♠ Q x x x ♥ K J x x x ♦ A K x ♣ x,

which is a pretty thin three-heart bid whatever it means. So I'm sticking with (A).

Now that I've decided to shift to a diamond, does it matter whether I cash the club king first or not? It can't hurt to try to cash it. If the club gets ruffed, a diamond shift wasn't doing any good anyway. And not cashing it might give me a problem, since I won't be sure how many tricks I need elsewhere.

I play the club king. Partner follows with the five, and declarer ruffs with the five of hearts. Declarer plays the six of hearts--three--queen--ten. Then the deuce of hearts--jack--ace--four. How about that? Jack played the suit correctly. He guarded against the one four-zero break he could handle.

He plays the deuce of spades--four--nine--three. It appears declarer is 3-5-4-1. Unless partner has the ace-king of diamonds, we're not beating this. Declarer plays the five of diamonds--three--king. Making four.

	NORTH Nathanial ♠ K J 10 9 ♥ Q 9 8 2 ♦ 7 5 ♣ J 6 2
WEST Phillip ♠ A 6 4 ♥ 4 3 ♦ 8 6 4 ♣ A K Q 10 3		EAST Jack ♠ 8 7 3 ♥ J 10 ♦ A Q 10 3 ♣ 8 7 5 4
	SOUTH Marcus ♠ Q 5 2 ♥ A K 7 6 5 ♦ K J 9 2 ♣ 9

Declarer was on a diamond guess. He apparently played partner for the diamond ace because he assumed I had the spade ace. But couldn't partner have ducked the spade ace? Declarer should have led the five of spades (Rule 2 for scrambling count signals ) to the king. It would be much harder for partner to duck now. From partner's perspective, declarer might have two small spades and might have just misguessed. In fact, to make this maneuver more convincing, declarer might do that at trick three, trusting us to have found a spade ruff already if one was available. It's true that if hearts were four-zero, he might regret wasting that dummy entry. But a four-zero trump break seems unlikely on the auction. I think the danger of misguessing diamonds is more pressing. As it is, the diamonds were misguess-proof.

South made a rather aggressive three heart call, apparently spurred on by his singleton club. The opponents probably would not have reached game had I passed or doubled instead of overcalling two clubs. Sometimes it seems that the worst time to bid is when your hand is pure. If all your cards are working, then all the opponents' cards are working also, and bidding just pushes them into a making game or slam that they would not have bid on their own. Perhaps two clubs is wrong. We probably can't outbid the opponents in clubs, so finding a club fit may help them more than it helps us. Maybe double, trying to find a fit where we can actually outbid them, is a better idea.

I'm not yet prepared to reach that conclusion. But I will certainly be on the look-out for additional deals involving this principle. I may change my strategy in the future. One of the things that makes bridge a difficult game to learn is that the feedback is imperfect. If you get a bad result, you can't be sure whether you did something wrong or were just unlucky. So it's easy to keep making the same mistakes over and over. To improve, you need to be continually evaluating your actions, and you need a long memory. I'm pretty good on the evaluating part. Sadly, my memory isn't what it used to be. The truth is, in a couple of weeks I'll probably have forgotten about this deal. If I do this again with a similar bad result, could you please remind me?

Luckily, our teammates reach game as well. The board is a push.

Table 1: -620
Table 2: +620

Result on Board 4: 0 imps
Total: +2 imps