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Chris Ackerley.

Toing and Froing....a deal from 2004. 

Chris Ackerley has written up a lot of interesting declarer deals for New Zealand Bridge Magazine during its existence…and has been successful in a good number of them too. In the December 2004 Otago-Southland Regional Report, he covered one such deal which was the making or breaking of the 22-week Otago Club Teams, as far as his team were concerned.

 

(The bidding was similar to the above.)

Make 3NT and Chris’ team would win this marathon event. At the other table, his opponents had reached 4 and found an inescapable heart loser to go with three cashing aces…down 1. So, he was in the “hot 3NT seat”, a makeable contract perhaps on 3 lead (3rds and 5ths)  from West.

Rightly or wrongly, Chris put up dummy’s K to try and flush out A. No luck as East played 2. What would be your plan to come to 9 tricks?

The danger, of course, is the spade suit. With three aces to lose, he could not allow a defender to score 2 or 3 spade tricks, a possibility since the opening lead and East’s 2 seemed to suggest a 5-2 spade break. He could try to set up 5 heart tricks but would have to lose the lead too many times in getting to 9…and if there were aces in the hand with 5 spades, the contract would fail. Even a 4-3 spade break posed a big danger.

Over to Chris: “The obvious line is to set up the hearts but that allows the opponents time to set up the spades first.” These were the four hands:

 

There was a touch of hindsight in his next statement because, of course, the A could have been in either defender’s hand.

“Perhaps a declarer should first play Q to knock out the dangerous entry. Then how are you going to get back to dummy to enjoy the long hearts.” It would seem on the above lay-out that West would duck this card but entries back to dummy would still be at a premium…and indeed if Chris then played 4 rounds of hearts, he could only score 5 hearts, 2 spades and 1 club in time….and West would prevail. Back to Chris:

“Foreseeing all this, I almost got it right and played a small diamond to 7 in hand. Next came a diamond to K, West discarding a heart. If East took this trick, I could come to 3 hearts, 4 diamonds and 2 spade tricks. So, East ducked this and I now turned my attention to hearts. I played 4 rounds and after East won the fourth round, these cards remained:”

East was on lead and at that point, Chris had won 6 of the first 7 tricks. He needed a spade entry to dummy to cash his two winning hearts there. However, when East played 7, West could deny Chris that entry. If Chris had inserted 10, West would win, trapping Chris in hand with a third round of spades. If Chris inserted Q, West would simply duck and once more Chris was in the wrong hand.

Although the A never scored a trick, the defence took 3 spade tricks, J and A for one down…flat board…and the winning of the Club Teams was gone. Over to Chris:

“ I had made a big mistake at trick 1, not so much in going up with K but in not unblocking my Q underneath it. It was thus doubly annoying to have found the right esoteric line in the diamond suit and to have avoided the more obvious losing plays but to have stuffed up with an elementary error. “

Harsh self-critical words, but had Chris ducked from dummy at trick 1 to play a diamond from hand, he would likely have failed in his contract. The best card at trick 1 seems to be J, Chris then proceeding as above firstly with diamonds and then hearts, thus preserving K as a certain entry to dummy.

Lots of toing and froing between hands and an "almost" success for Chris. Alas, “almost” did not produce a plus score.

Richard Solomon

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