Misadventures In Manhattan

The guy I play with on Thursday nights had his routine radically disturbed one way or another over the past few weeks. So when I sat down to play with him last night, it wasn’t just our first game of 2009, it was actually the first game with him for a month. And the computer seemed to want to celebrate by giving us some weird stuff.

The obligatory punt had to wait for the second half.

N    E    S    W
1♠   pass 2♣   pass
2♥   pass 3NT  pass
6♠   all pass

It’s your lead from:
♠7 6  ♥ 10 6 3 2  ♦ K J 8 6 4 3  ♣ Q

So what’ll it be? (The full hand is a bit further down).

In the first half we seemed to be trapped in a world of clubs. Five times the contract was 3♣, and on a sixth board it was 5♣-2 and arguably we should have been in 3♣. That’s a quarter of the boards in one contract – definitely odd. In the third round, one of the non-3♣ boards was when we doubled the opponents in 4♥.

N    E    S    W
Pass pass 1♦   3♥
3♠   pass pass 4♥
?
You hold:
♠10 7 6 3 2  ♥ -  ♦ K 10 6  ♣ A Q J 8 4

You’ve mouse-trapped yourself, of course. If you had bid 4♣ over 3♥, you would be bidding 4♠ like a shot. Now you’re somewhat stuck. But you have an ace and a king; partner opened, and he doesn’t usually get too frisky in third seat; you have a void in trumps, and West hasn’t bid like someone with a nine-card suit (although bidding again is a bit suspicious), so maybe partner has a nice surprise in the trump suit. So you whack them.

And as usual, West does indeed have a nine-card suit, solidified by his partner’s singleton queen. And the 1=9=1=2 distribution delivers a tenth trick when dummy has the ♣K – if the doubleton had been somewhere else, even a nine-card suit wouldn’t have been enough.

Even more droll is the traveler – you open it, and announce “flat”. -590, -590, -590 – what a start.

Now back to that slam. I’m going to call this my slam try – you bid the slam, then try to make it.

N-S Game, dlr N

           ♠ A K Q J 9 8 5 2
           ♥ Q J 8 4
           ♦ -
           ♣ 10
♠ 10 4 3               ♠ 7 6
♥ K 9        [ ]       ♥ 10 6 3 2
♦ 10 9 7               ♦ K J 8 6 4 3
♣ A J 6 5 4            ♣ Q
           ♠ -
           ♥ A 7 5
           ♦ A Q 5 2
           ♣ K 9 8 7 3 2

N    E    S    W
1♠   pass 2♣   pass
2♥   pass 3NT  pass
6♠   all pass

West clearly shouldn’t lead a major suit on this bidding. I think it’s pretty obvious that if North has a loser outside the majors, you need to try and cash it at trick one. Maybe North was encouraged by a club fit, so West led a diamond, which might have been correct. But it wasn’t, so the club loser disappeared and 6♠ rolled home. Pretty brutal, really.