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The High Wire: it’s dangerous!

One slip spells disaster!

The on-line Fullarton Teams over the last weekend saw a narrow victory for the team of Jan Alabaster- Pam Livingston and Jenna and Christine Gibbons, a nice boost for them prior to representing New Zealand in the Venice Cup in Morocco in one week’s time.

Before looking at the results, here is an opening lead problem for you. We know opening leads are so often crucial and when leading to a doubled part-score where the downside is a vulnerable game for one’s opponents, then they are even more crucial! 

 

 

You are very happy to make a penalty double of East’s strong no-trump overcall. Unsurprisingly, West does not want to stay there. 2NT is “pick a minor” and East does. Without the best of trump suits, you double again and there matters rest. Your lead?

With one round left Wilson (Russells Wilson and Dive, Kathy and Anthony Ker) had the minutest lead over Livingston with the two leaders playing each other. The match and the overall win went to Livingston 12.90 with both Carryer (Colin Carryer- Sandra Calvert, Rachelle Pelkman- Murray Wood) and Fisher (Blair and Liz Fisher, John Wang – Gary Chen) finishing strongly to push Wilson down to 4^th place. A big win also saw Boughey (Steve Boughey – William Liu, Candice Smith – Kinga Hajmasi) rise to 5^th place.

So, have you selected your lead yet? Is it to be -670 or + 200? The path to +200 was two-fold, requiring not just the correct opening lead but the correct continuation as well:

 

West had decided to play the right minor suit albeit one level higher than they would probably wish. If they had to choose which honours and shape their partner held for their 1NT overcall, then East’s collection would have been pretty close to perfection. For all that, 3 x could be beaten as long as South led a trump at trick 1.

Any temptation South has for getting a spade ruff must be overlooked. West sounded and indeed was distributional and the only way declarer can make tricks opposite a very weak hand is by cross-ruffing. Of course, East should not have a singleton diamond for their 1NT overcall, though that bid seemed to be a better lie than a take-out double of 1. Were partner to choose 2 in response to such a double, they might just be a little disappointed with dummy’s trumps.

After the initial trump lead, declarer emerged with J to North’s A. It has to be a second trump now…but, perhaps thinking their partner was void in spades, North played J. There was no second chance. Declarer won and now cross-ruffed four hearts and three diamonds. A and 8 trump tricks amounted to contract made. A second round of trumps would have left East a trick short.

Doubling 3 was risky as we have seen though would have produced a good swing in had the defence prevailed. Almost every other North-South pair played in 4 where there were three top  black suit losers and an unavoidable trump loser too. Lesson learnt the hard way that in such a situation the defence needs to play trumps, from the start and given a second opportunity, then too.

Richard Solomon

 

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