No-Brainer

7th October – Board 17: Love All. Dealer North.

	North: S J 5 H A Q 9 5 D K J 4 2 C A 9 6
West: S 8 3 H 6 4 D 10 9 8 7 3 C K J 7 5		East: S A K Q 10 9 6 4 2 H 10 8 2 D 5 C Q
	South: S 7 H K J 7 3 D A Q 6 C 10 8 4 3 2

The difference between pairs and team play was demonstrated most forcibly in the hand shown above. What would you have done, or what did you do, on that South hand after your partner has opened 1H and the next hand has bid 4S? In teams play it is what they call a ‘no-brainer’ and a bid of 5H should be routine. The logic behind it is this: in the worse case scenario both 4S and 5H might fail by a trick but if you guess wrong you have only lost a few imps because you have converted +50 into -50, a swing of 4imps. Now assume both contracts make. By remaining silent you will lose 420 or 9 imps while bidding 5H will give you 450 or 10 imps, making a swing of 19 imps in all. At pairs however all that matters is which will give the best score and it is too close to call. Going one down in 5H will score zero if the rest of the field are going one down in 4S! (I would bid 5H, I know I would, and it would be the wrong decision here.)

At the table where I watched the bidding went: -

West	North	East	South
	1H	4S	5H
End

East led the singleton diamond and declarer played the ace from dummy and drew just two rounds of trumps with the ace and the king. He then played out his top diamonds in the hope that West had started with five diamonds and three hearts in which case the spade from dummy could be thrown and the two spade losers in hand ruffed. In which case there would be just two club losers. As you can see this plan backfired when East ruffed the second diamond and the contract ended up going two down. Ironically while declarer’s plan would have been fine at teams it was perhaps flawed at pairs. Other people in 5H are likely to get a spade lead which would lead to a one trick defeat only, so perhaps declarer should have played with the field and settled for one down too.