Dubious Logic

Bridge Hand or Bridge Problem

There are bridge hands and there are bridge problems. You can usually spot the problems by their artificiality – the so called double dummy variety allow you to see all four hands for example – and they invariably have a purity of form. Bridge hands by contrast are complicated, messy things, often there is no right answer. This poser arrived by e-mail and I did not know if it was a problem or a hand.

South opens one spade and you force yourself into a contract of six hearts as West. North leads the ten of spades and you ruff. When you cash two top trumps, North shows out on the second round. What next?

South appears to have five or more spades, three hearts and so may well have a singleton diamond. Your plan at the table – were this a hand – would no doubt have been to draw trumps and try the diamonds. That won't work against the suit dividing 4-1 so you pause to think. The penny drops; it will do South no good to ruff a diamond, he cannot get off lead without conceding a trick to the club queen or the spade king. So you must play the side suit leaving a trump outstanding. What order do you play diamonds in? It hardly seems to matter, you can't make if the suit is 5-0, so you play ace, queen then king. That was my first go.

No good said the problem setter. South waits for two rounds and only when you ruff the fourth round in dummy does he over-ruff and play the ace of spades. The king is a trick in dummy but you cannot reach it. Can you see a better line for your second attempt?

This time we play three rounds of diamonds ending with the queen in dummy. South cannot profitably ruff as above so now we trump a spade in hand and lead a fourth diamond. The situation will be;

North has a diamond winner and when he plays it we discard the spade king from dummy. We have end-played North not South. Down to just black cards it seems as long as he has the knave of clubs playing either that suit or a spade yields you a trick to cover your club loser. But there is a small fly in the ointment. If South started with only five spades then he can discard two of them and reduce to A, J, ---, Kxxx in the diagram above. Now when you allow North to hold the lead and throw the king of spades, South throws his ace.

So to redress my poor first effort I mentioned that you need South to hold six spades and the defence above. Back came the verdict. "Drat! I missed that, and he said he was 5-3-1-4". So maybe it was not a problem but a hand after all…

Published Saturday 20.Jan.2001