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Giving up…or Cashing up?

One important facet, and one we have highlighted this week from the recent North Island Pairs, is the search for overtricks. An overtrick at Pairs can be  as valuable as a slam bid and made at imp scoring. How far would you take that with the following decision here? Which game would you bid…or would you give your partner a choice?

 

1 promised at least 3 clubs and 1NT showed 12-14 and presumably a heart hold.

Without any artificiality involved, 3 would leave that decision to partner assuming it is forcing to game. 4 looks like the safer game with West guaranteed to have at least 2 spades. However, would it score the most match-points?

At at least one table, East chose to try 3NT. This is what North was looking at after a small heart saw dummy’s 10 win the first trick.

 

Declarer played clubs at tricks 2 and 3, A and K and then played a low diamond towards the Q in dummy. Hopefully, as North you were still awake, awake to the fact that a strong spade suit remained unplayed…and your holding in that suit offered no hope for defensive tricks.

At times, cashing aces seems counter-productive to good defence but not so at Pairs. Were you to play low at trick 4, you would score just one ace, at trick 13:

 

Were South blessed with Q and 2 smaller clubs, then 4 was definitely the place to be as the defence could hold West to 9 tricks in 3NT (2 hearts, a club and A) but that was not the case on this day.

3NT making 11 tricks looks like it would still be a top score for East-West, though not quite true. Strangely, when East was declarer in 4, that was not to be the case. A heart lead from South went to North’s Q. Surely at that point, A could not hurt the defence but that did not always happen. Nor did North seize their ace when a diamond was led towards the closed hand. As you can see, KJ enabled a ruffing finesse to take place and the defence, on four occasions, lost the last 12 tricks.
Not that significant a deal at imp scoring but at Pairs, for the defence a disastrous result if North could not cash their two red aces.
Laying down aces at Pairs may certainly not be giving up. It may be necessary to ensure an average or average plus score…. and that is all we can achieve on some boards.

Richard Solomon

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