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Finding (not having!) a Fit.

We know we need to have a minimum of 8 trumps between our two hands, dummy’s and our own, for that suit to be our trump suit. That is called a "fit". It is normally fairly easy to find such a fit when each hand has 4 trumps but can be a little harder when one hand has five and the other three.

It would be easy, for instance, to miss the best game contract with the following hand if you did not conduct a little exploration during the bidding. You hold:

Spade-small AK

Heart-small QT943

Diamond-small K762

Club-small J4

with your partner opening 1Club-small. You respond 1Heart-small and your partner bids 1Spade-small. With 13 high card points opposite your partner’s opening bid, you know that your side is going to reach a game contract. With your partner bidding both black suits and you having a reasonable holding in both red suits, 3NT may seem to be the best bet…but wait! You have 5 hearts. Just imagine that your partner had 3.

They could not show that kind of support in the bidding so far. If that was the case, then your partner may be very short in diamonds. They may not have any diamonds if they had 6 clubs, 4 spades and 3 hearts. Although we do have a diamond hold, it might not be good enough if we had to lose the lead in setting up a suit in 3NT.

West                          East

  1Club-small                             1Heart-small

  1Spade-small                            ?
(the opposition are silent)

not sure.jpg

These are all “maybes” but they are real problems raised. Rather than just bid 3NT directly, it should be time to do a little exploration. We need to make a bid that is forcing and asks our partner more about their hand. That bid is the bid of the unbid (4th) suit, 2Diamond-small. When we start to play bridge, we learn that we should have at least 4 cards in a suit to bid that suit. Here we do have 4 diamonds and so can make that bid. Yet, as we have discussed in recent weeks, we can make that same bid, of the 4th suit bid by our side, even if we have less than 4 cards in that suit, to find out more about partner’s hand…like “have they a hold in diamonds?”

If they bid 2NT, or maybe 3Club-small, in response to our 2Diamond-small bid, we would follow up with 3NT as we have our own diamond hold. Yet, say partner bids 2Heart-small?

West                          East

1Club-small                               1Heart-small

1Spade-small                               2Diamond-small

2Heart-small

Partner has chosen to show some support for our suit as opposed to say bidding no-trumps or rebidding their own suit. They are very likely now to have three hearts.

Time for a rethink. If we have a 5-3 heart fit, we should bid 4Heart-small not 3NT. It might just be the safer game. Indeed it is as in 3NT, we can see almost certainly  we have to lose the lead to the Heart-smallA before we can make 9 tricks. Let’s look at partner’s hand and start to plan the play in 4Heart-small after South led the Spade-smallT.

West Deals
Both Vul
   
Q 5 4 3
K 7 3
J
A Q 9 7 3
 
N
W   E
S
 
A K
Q 10 9 4 2
K 7 6 2
J 4
West North East South
1  Pass 1  Pass
1  Pass 2  Pass
2  Pass 4  All pass

 

North follows with a spade to trick 1.

Naturally, we will be back on Sunday with all 4 hands.

A little exploration can go a long way to getting to the right contract.

Richard Solomon

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