Deal of the Week from Bridge Ace

Greetings!

We took last week off from mailing out our Deal of the Week because we were still too stuffed with Thanksgiving turkey. But we're back this week with another deal for you. This one is courtesy of the Wednesday Game, which we ran again this week.

The analysis is done by Brian Gunnell.

To Preempt or Not to Preempt

And yet another preempting decision, here it is South in the hot seat. Would you open her hand 2♠? That's a partnership question, we suppose, but by our standards this hand is just too good. For starters it passes the Rule of 20 (add HCP to the length of your two longest suits), added to which all the HCP are working, and there are even some useful trump intermediates as a bonus. It's fine to have a range of 5-10, but some 10-counts are just too good, and this is one of them. Of course, some partnerships still use 5-11 but, as any 11-count with a 6-card suit automatically passes the Rule of 20 (11+6+3 gets there), perhaps 11 should be removed from the range.

North's 4♦ was a splinter showing game-values, a Spade fit and Diamond shortness. What would a Double by East mean here? Generally speaking, Doubles of artificial bids are lead-directing, but is there really any point in doubling for the lead of a suit that Dummy is short in? The answer is "No!" and many partnerships use the Double to request the lead of one of the other two side-suits. Which one? Take your pick, one common method is that the Double requests the lead of the suit below the splinter (and if North had splintered in Clubs then the suit below would be Hearts). Does that mean that, on this hand, East should double 4♦ for a Club lead? We are not sure that is a great idea, East has something in both side-suits, so on this hand it might be better to pass and trust Partner's good judgment.

Against 4♠, West has a natural Heart lead, and Declarer can reel in 12 tricks by careful use of the Spade entries to set up the Clubs:

Heart lead won in Dummy
Cash ♣A and ruff a Club (high)
Over to Dummy's ♠Q
Ruff a Club (high)

When the ♣K comes down in three rounds, Declarer crosses to Dummy's ♠J, gets rid of the Heart loser on the Clubs and ends up losing just one Diamond. Of course, the ♣K is more likely to come down in four rounds, in which case it would have been just 11 tricks.

You can follow the bidding and play of this deal with our online Bridge Movie

We run the Wednesday Game, which is played by clubs around the country, on the first Wednesday of every month. It features hand analyses of all the boards you play that day. The next game will be Wednesday, January 5, 2011. Why not give it a try?

Cheers,