MOUNTNESSING BRIDGE CLUB
Meets every Thursday at 7.25 for 7.30
at Mountnessing Village Hall, Roman Road, Mountnessing, Essex, England, CM15 0UG

The Director's Deal…

1. Splinter: singleton / void in diamonds plus secondary spade support

2. Roman Key Card Blackwood, anchored on Spades

3. Two out of five 'Aces' (counting the King of spades as an 'Ace') but without the Queen of spades

There is a lot more to this hand than is immediately apparent. It took a string of coincidences before the hand happened at all.

At the start of the evening, this board was set out with its partner, number 9, on table 5, as is customary. It so happened that sitting North / South at table 5 was a player who was returning to the club after a lengthy 'lay-off' due to illness, and so he was unaware of the new regime of computer dealt boards, so while he was waiting for play to start, he helpfully shuffled and dealt both boards 9 and 10, ….

It is very rare for the club to have a non-playing director, but it just so happened that on this particular occasion while the shuffled board 9 was being played, it proved possible to return board 10 to its intended layout, as shown above.

Looking at the North / South hands, 4S looks automatic, and 6S looks tempting, and indeed several pairs did try 6S on the hand. I'd like to think that my regular partner and I would have reached 6S following an auction as above. If we had have reached that slot, then Declarer would have needed to have been very sharp...

So South finds himself as Declarer, perhaps in 4S, perhaps in a slam. Remember that this is a pairs event and every trick counts. It is tempting for Declarer to think that if there is King doubleton trump on side and if the hearts are 3-3, then there are six trumps, 5 hearts tricks and two minor suit Aces on offer, for a total of thirteen, and even if things go slightly awry, there are still good chances of making 12 tricks. So when West kicks off with the Jack of Clubs, dummy rises with the Ace and Declarer plays a trump to the Queen, and ….. now West must win two trump tricks to hold Declarer to 11 tricks.

Perhaps Declarer should stop for a minute and note that the chances of a 3-3 heart break are about one in three (see suit split table), and that by similar reasoning the chances of the spades falling so kindly are about one in five, so overall this plan for 13 tricks has about a 7% chance of coming off. Bridge players who pursue odds of that sort are not generally successful in the long run. However, the prospects of making 12, rather than 13, tricks following a small spade to the Queen are much higher: any 2-2 trump break and hearts no worse than 4-2 for a start, and there are additional small chances too, such as finding a singleton Jack off-side, and I believe that overall on this line of play, statistically the slam has about a 40-45% chance.

There is, however, a far more imaginative line of play. Declarer wins the club lead and immediately ruffs a club, then plays the Ace of Diamonds and ruffs a diamond. A second club ruff in hand is followed by a second diamond ruff. This play is followed by a heart to the Queen, then a heart to the Ace. Declarer plays a small heart from Dummy and ruffs in hand, and then plays his last diamond, which is ruffed in Dummy, leaving this 3-card ending, with the lead in Dummy (North):

Declarer plays any card from Dummy and ruffs with the 8 and West is end-played to concede the last two tricks to Declarer's Ace / Queen.

Having (above) pursued at length the statistical chances of success in a slam following the play of a small trump to the Queen, I ought to to offer balance by looking at the chances of success via what turns out to be the winning line. One key point is that there is an element of 'combining chances', because there are several steps along the way where Declarer still has the opportunity to revert to 'Plan A'. The two particularly vulnerable points in the play are that, when the third heart is led from Dummy (at trick 9) and ruffed, Declarer might be over-ruffed, and when the last diamond is ruffed in Dummy (trick 10) that could be over-ruffed. The maths gets too complicated to consider in this piece, but basically overall you are adding chances to those of the basic 40-45% line.

I would have been proud to find that play at the table. In practice, only one player in the room made 12 tricks – so who was that player? It was Ken Hunter, who was playing North / South at table 5, and who had just returned from illness...

Things went slightly differently at table 5, but in essence it was similar. At that table, North, rather than South, was declarer. In fact the end-play can be killed dead at trick 1 if the hand is played by North – East just has to lead a trump at trick 1 and now West really MUST make two trump tricks. However, we are taught that the lead of a singleton trump is often a bad idea, so instead East led the King of Diamonds. Thereafter the play was similar to that outlined above. Well done to Ken!