The BBO ACBL Club Bulletin #20

By Dan Israeli (ACBL_17)

Welcome to this week's ACBL Club Bulletin.
Every week I will bring a few interesting hands played in our very own ACBL games, and try to show you how the hand should be bid and played. Of course, Bridge is not an exact science, so I will try to bring more than one angle. I hope you will find this interesting and useful.

If you come across an interesting hand you'd like to share and have analyzed, or if you have an interesting story to tell or a question to ask, feel free to email me.
My email address is ehhehh@gmail.com.

A few preliminary notes:

1. I try to keep the bidding simple. The Basic SAYC system is used, but mostly it is common sense bridge, added with a few simple gadgets.
2. Some boards will require a more scientific approach, but nothing really major. I believe good bridge can be played without 200 pages of agreements.

Hand 1:
This hand was played in a recent swiss teams event that I played in Scotland.
I had an interesting defensive decision to make at trick 2.
The cards held by declarer and partner have been concealed so that you can test your defensive skills. They will be revealed later.

Part 1:
(Click the NEXT button to view the presentation)

The rule of 11 is a very important defensive tool. Take partner's spot card lead and subtract it from 11, and the result you get is the number of cards higher than the lead in the other 3 hands. You can see two of them, dummy's and your own, and this way you can figure out how many cards higher than the lead declarer holds.
In this example, if partner's 7 of hearts is really 4th, then using the rule of 11, we get the number four. Dummy's got two higher cards than the 7, and we have the ace, so that leaves declarer with only one card higher than the lead. When declarer follows with the jack, we can reasonably conclude that partner did not lead 4th, unless declarer is falsecarding.

Part 2:
In this part I will show you how declarer can make the contract if the defense fails to switch to diamonds at trick two.

(Click the NEXT button)

The concept of safety plays is very important. Sometimes we should give up potential overtricks in order to secure the contract against a bad layout.
In this hand the safety play is not absolute, because the contract will still be down if east has both spade honors and west has the diamond king, but playing the ace is safe in any other layout.

Hand 2:
Last week I presented a double dummy problem. .
Some of you solved it already, but to those who didn't, here is the solution.

(Click the NEXT button)

An elimination play is when we clear a suit and then throw in a defender, and he does not have a safe exit card, because he no longer holds cards in the suit we eliminated.
In this deal, the elimination play was not complete, only parttial, because the last trump has not been drawn. If west held this last trump, he could play it when thrown in with the diamond queen. Luckily, east is the one who holds it, so the partial elimination play was successful.
It was crucial to keep the third trump in dummy, because it was needed for a ruff if west plays a spade back.


That's it for today.
I hope you had a good time.
See you next week!

Dan Israeli