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Does “Crime” pay?

It is not too hard a problem for this Monday. Normally, when you pick up a very rare “rock-crusher” looking hand, your partner does their best to spoil your pleasure by opening a Weak 2 or pre-empting in your shortest suit. Not so, today, though. Take a look:

 

 

Well, they have not chosen your best suit but diamonds is a very good second-best to indicate a pre-emptive holding. You could even forgive them a 6-card suit this time, if they would ever dare to do such a thing! Being vulnerable and “topless” when it comes to honours, you could anticipate 7 cards.

So, where to go?

You probably have already made your Blackwood bid. If they own up to the missing ace, you will be racing off to grand slam and claiming even more quickly. But no, the reply is they hold no aces or key-cards. So, small slam it has to be…and even though we are playing Teams not Pairs, we should bid 6NT because there is no guarantee that partner has the Q and we would hate to lose the first two spade tricks in 6. How pessimistic but very true.

So, 6NT closes the bidding and K hits the table from West. Dummy is not quite what a vulnerable pre-empt is supposed to look like. Partner’s quiet comment that they do hold 3 honour cards feels a little humourless at present as you can only count up to 11 tricks.

 

 There seems nothing for it but to run your diamond winners. The opponents have 1 diamond each. Their discards will be interesting. After 6 rounds of the suit, you have thrown J7 while East has parted with 3 clubs and 2 spades and West has thrown 4 spades and a small heart. Both threw small spades. One of them has A though it is not clear which one.

On the last diamond, J comes from East and 10 from West as you discard 8. The worry is that West has the remaining two spades and Q though you will be defeated even if it is A and Q.

So, it comes down to playing hearts. Are you game enough…low to 10? If you want a plus score, you must do that as these were the four hands:

 

This is no made-up story. Two North players did open 3 and their partners did bid to the supposedly safer contract of 6NT though 6 would be decidedly dodgy on the lead of a club from East…at least until the Q falls under the ace at trick 1.

East is squeezed on the run of the diamonds in 6NT (even though their last 5 cards can be 4 hearts and A) but neither East was in real life put to the test as their partner’s opening lead was a spade, giving the relieved and slightly shell-shocked declarers (they had seen dummy before they counted to 12!) a quick claim.

Name and “Acclaim”

It might come as no surprise to their fellow bridge peers that the 2 3 openers both hail from this side of the Tasman, Brad Johnston and David Dolbel. Brad is still technically “Youth” in the bridge sense though Dave has long lost that label. Credit though to their partners, Ramon  Quennell  who is definitely Youth and Denis Humphries who is definitely not, for finding the 6NT bid both being rewarded by the opening lead.

Only 2 other North-South pairs out of the 16 who held the hand found slam, 6. One, a more “conservative” Australian Youth player contented himself with opening a Weak 2 in diamonds though I rather liked the sequence again from across the Tasman of:

                  North                         South

                  Pass ¹                              2

                  2                             2NT

                  5                             6

                  Pass

¹ a very sound “action”

Most of the rest passed as North with auctions mainly subsiding in 5.

While a 3 pre-empt vulnerable worked well on this day ("crime" did pay) , four days later sanity prevailed when North held the following hand in 1^st seat, with only E/W vulnerable:

83     T3   AKJ9742     98

Fortunately, perhaps for Brad and David, they were not playing in this event as this North hand would seem to be way too strong to open 3. Opposite a 4234, 14 count, 5 made thanks to one finesse. Only 6 out of 21 pairs bid and made game (3NT had 9 top tricks.). Our standards for pre-empts must obviously have dropped over the years.

Richard Solomon

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