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Vuln: None
You are: S
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Board # 1 Dealer: Vuln:
Slam Happy
By Paul Bowyer
Your partner's exuberant bidding leads you to an "interesting" contract here.
How might you reel it in?
You open 1♠here and rebid 2NT over partner’s 2♣ response. To your surprise and alarm North suddenly emerges with a bid of 6♠. Well, there’s nothing you can do about it now. Pass and await the dummy with trepidation.
North’s hand is pretty good – 20 points and the three top Spades. Not bad – not bad at all! The fly in the ointment is that the ♥Q is useless as it clashes with the doubleton ♥A K in hand. ‘Twas ever thus.
A count of winners and losers (we are in a suit contract, remember) shows that we have too many losers – a Club loser and a Diamond loser (or two). Bad news. Winners are a little on the thin side as well: five Spades, two Hearts, one Diamond and two Clubs. That’s two tricks short.
When trying to generate extra tricks (or to eradicate losers) we often look to long suits. After all, with excess losers we either trump ‘em or dump ‘em. Here we can’t trump them so we had better look for a way of dumping them. Dummy’s long Club suit may well prove to be the dumping ground for our two Diamond losers.
Let’s recount. On a 3-2 Club break we might have five Spades, two Hearts, one Diamond and four Clubs. That totals twelve.
Right, let’s get to work. We win the Heart lead and then…? First we must pull trumps. They (irritatingly) break 4-1 so we have to play off the ♠A K Q, cross to the other top Heart, draw the last trump and set up the Clubs. As dummy is now bereft of outside entries we have to duck a Club.
We win the Diamond return and discover our luck in Clubs. A 3-2 break will allow us our contract; we would be two down with a 4-1 split.
Lady Luck resides with us today – the Clubs all fall on the ♣A K and we dump our Diamond losers on the long Clubs. Contract made.
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