Help
Scoring: MP
This was board 18 of the first semi-final session of the recent Blue Ribbon Pairs in Hawaii. I was West and my partner was Sheila Ekeblad.
I opened 1C in 3rd position, North doubled, Sheila bid 1♥, and South's 1NT ended the auction.
I led my 4th best club and declarer made what seems (at first glance at least) to be the reasonable play of overtaking dummy's ♣9 (Sheila followed with the ♣2 - standard carding) in order to lead a spade toward the dummy. I followed with the ♠Q (an instructive point for non-experts) and dummy's ♠K won the trick.
Declarer played a second round of spades to Sheila's ♠J. She returned the ♣8, covered by declarer and won by me with the ♣A. Not knowing who held the ♣7, I switched to the ♥J, ducked to Sheila's ♥K. She returned her last club which declarer won in hand.
At this point the declarer (a famous player) made the mistake of failing to cash the ♥Q, but I suppose he can be forgiven for not forseeing the consequences of this decision. Instead he exited in spades. I won and cashed my remaining 2 club winners. This was the position when I led my last club:
Scoring: MP
Dummy had to come down to 4 cards and obviously had to keep both diamonds. If declarer had discarded a heart from dummy (to keep the spade winner he worked so hard to establish), I would have played a 2nd heart and Sheila would have had a heart to cash (for down 2) when she won her ♦A.
Declarer therefore discarded dummy's last spade, but this was no better. Sheila accurately pitched a diamond on this trick, I played a diamond to Sheila's ♦A, and she returned the suit. The heart blockage meant that, in the 2-card ending, the declarer could not avoid giving us another trick. He could either win trick 12 with the ♥Q (I would win trick 13 in diamonds) or win trick 12 with the ♥A (Sheila would win trick 13 in hearts).
Our +200 was worth almost all of the matchpoints.
That was fun
Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com