Bridge

The Cavendish tournament is taking place this week in Las Vegas. Today’s deal, from last year’s event, produced some scintillating play and defense possibilities.

In six hearts you win the spade lead, strip off the spades, draw trumps, and lead a diamond to dummy’s ace. East wins the second diamond and must lead a club for you – and now your club loser vanishes. As easy as ABC? Not quite. Two players sitting East, Zia Mahmood and Gene Freed, unblocked the diamond king under the ace. Their declarers then went down by leading a club to the ace and a club up.

On reflection, both unlucky declarers may have ended up kicking themselves for two reasons. The first is that if they had cashed the diamond ace at trick two, they might have avoided tipping East off to the necessity for the unblock. More seriously, six hearts was still makable even after the unblock if they could have worked out from the tempo of the play of the diamond king that East had a diamond left.

Since East surely has the club king (or there would have been no need to unblock), you lead the club queen from dummy, covered all around. Then you cash the diamond queen before playing a second club to dummy’s 10. East wins and then must either give a ruff-and-discard to allow a diamond discard from dummy, or lead a club from his 8-3 into dummy’s 9-5, allowing South to pitch both diamond losers.

Bid with the aces

South holds:

Answer: Bid two no-trump. Your partner has three hearts (probably with four spades and five diamonds) and some extras. Your honor location suggests no-trump might still be the right denomination, though, so make a slightly forward-going move with a two-no-trump call. Partner can bid game with extras over what he has already shown.