Daisy Picking

24th May – Board 20: Game All.  Dealer West.

It’s nice to have some groovy gadgets for bidding purposes but that doesn’t mean you have to use them come what may and I think the hand below is a case in point. Surely East is worth a shot at game when his partner opens with a weak two regardless of points held or indeed suit quality, which make the Ogust bid of 2NT somewhat unnecessary. We call it daisy picking! Anyway it would be feeble for South not to compete and if West adds one for the road it is hard to see North not doing the same, although 5♥ is defeated on best defence.

Best defence, however, might be quite hard to find. Certainly if North leads a top spade there are twelve easy tricks but even if North leads his singleton diamond and declarer plays the jack things could well go wrong. To start with South might try to cash a spade or might even underlead the spades in order to put his partner in with his putative queen in order to lead another diamond. Remember from South’s point of view North could easily have started with 109x in diamonds. It would certainly be hard to envisage partner with a singleton diamond and for the record no East/West pair made less than twelve tricks when they were the declaring side.