MindZine - Bridge

Danny Roth has come up with an excellent mixture of hands to test your declarer skills in a wide variety of situations justifying the "Intermediate/Advanced" category given to the book.

For each of the 62 problems you are initially shown just two hands, declarer's and dummy's, along with the bidding and the early play, then all four hands are shown in "The Solutions".

However, on a few of the problems, you could be shown all four hands immediately and still have difficulty finding the solution, as on the following example:

Hand 29. Dealer: South. E/W Vul.

6 4 3

K 6 4

Q 10 7 2

K 3 2

	N
W		E
	S

9 8 2

7 5 3 2

A Q J 10 9 8

J 9 6 4

K 8 3

J 9 8 4

A K Q J 10 7

A 5

A Q 10 6 5

After East has overcalled in hearts, you become declarer as South in 6. West leads 5 to dummy's 6 and East's 8. You ruff and play two top trumps, West showing out on the second. The danger is that West holds J-x-x-x. How do you plan for that contingency?

Even with just two hands in view, there would be no advantage to be gained from drawing a third round of trumps, and the standard procedure is to tackle your outside suit, which you can do by playing off A-Q. On a 3-2 club break, you could draw the outstanding trump and be certain of your contract, but, even as it is, East dare not ruff, otherwise he would be endplayed in the red suits.

So you continue with a club to dummy's King in order to ruff a second heart before playing a club to West's Jack, while discarding dummy's last heart. It is now West who is endplayed, being forced to open up diamonds or give away a ruff and discard. As a single-dummy problem, the key is to envisage that, in diamonds, West has to hold the Jack and East the King for you to succeed. It is also vital to win the third club in dummy.

Having pulled the rabbit out of the bag on the above problem, how will you fare with the other 61?

Peter Littlewood