All News

Leading from Nothing at the Trans -Tasman.

Nothing to go on? Well, not much. Certainly there is nothing much in our hand to admire, a true Yarborough. The bidding is swift, too. Try:

 

or a slightly more revealing:

 

2NT was in the 20-22 range. 3 asked about South’s majors and 3 or 3NT (depending on system) denied one.

This deal came from the latest round of matches in the Trans- Tasman Challenge played this week. Once again, the Kiwi teams proved stronger than their Australian counterparts with 6 wins and a draw in the 8 matches. These are the current top 8:

	Round 7		B/FWD		Latest		Opponent		Current Score
					result
1		NZ Cornell	88.11		10.91		Aus Mixed		99.02
2		Aus Seniors	73.82		16.26		NZ Fisher		90.08
3		NZ Terry	76.23		13.75		Aus Youth		89.98
4		NZ Skipper	75.43		13.52		Aus Women		88.95
5		NZ Livingston	73.98		11.2		Aus U 26  Women		85.18
6		NZ Carter	74.53		10.00		Aus Free		84.53
7		Aus Mixed	72.3		9.09		NZ Cornell		81.39
8		NZ Humphries	64.65		14.8		Aus Tobin		79.45

 

The overall current totals are New Zealand 647.86  Australia 472.14.

Of the 16 tables, 10 West players faced the lead problem given, with one of the two sequences given above. Actually 9 did. We will return to the 10^th shortly.

The two sequences are different in that in one the South hand is unknown and in the other, it is known not to hold a major suit. At 5 tables, a black card was led, 4 times a high club. They opted for safety though “safe leads” are not always the ones that beat contracts. At four tables, West led a heart and as you will see below, that was a very good choice:

 

The club lead would be very successful had East held AK6 or AK3 and both North and South a doubleton. That is low percentage and at tables where South denied a major even lower. Of course, North might hold a major which might only be 3-carded if they were looking for 5 in their partner’s hand.  

While the spade may be correct, (what seems certain is we are looking for partner’s suit), the chances of East holding 5 cards there are also low given West’s four card suit….but are a bit higher in the heart suit. We know East has honours somewhere too or else we would be defending a slam. It would be great to find partner’s suit with the opening lead.

So, well done to the 4 successful Wests who included Barry Jones and Yiwei Qi. Their partners were most impressed. Yiwei is another of the very promising group of youth players who learnt the game at Macleans College in Howick.

What then of the tenth table? The auction was the longer version above but East doubled 3NT. This tested one’s agreements to such a double, an unusual double where no suit has been bid by dummy. What is generally agreed is that East is looking for a major suit to be led but which one? Some have agreement that such a double asks for a spade, others for a heart and others for partner to lead their shorter major. As you can see, the second or third options would have been successful here. Alas, West led a spade.

After the club lead, South would have thought they had 9 tricks but when diamonds broke badly, they had to resort to the spade finesse though one top diamond had to be retained in the South hand if South wanted to score an overtrick, quite a possible outcome as it could not cost to cross to dummy after playing one top diamond and the other club honour. .

The last round of this competition is on 11^th October.

Richard Solomon

Go Back View All News Items