Friday, July 31, 2009

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder

To some, developing methods and devising special treatments gives pleasure. Put the overcaller on lead, declare from the positional holding, right-side contracts. It all sounds very nice in theory. Do the work, the gospel holds, and the rewards will come.

Say we hold Kx in a suit and are contemplating the best way of protecting it.
The case against it runs :
For it to be right
1) Partner needs to have a weak holding in the suit, say xx or Qxx
2) The ace of the suit has to be disadvantageously placed.
3) Even with the Ace offside, they have to lead the suit
4) Even if they lead it, the anti-positionality has to be relevant to the swing on the board.

Analyzing through Spingold '09 R/16 Set3 Jacobs vs Schermer, two hands strike my eye.

Hand 1


With an elegant auction, North-South right-side the contract. Spades was the danger suit and the ace was offside. The defence led a spade. Declarer crossed to a club to finesse the diamond. East won and continued a spade for down one.

I find this beautiful.

Bridge is so random, its beautiful.

It gets better.
In the other room, they bid 1D - 1NT; 3NT. West's natural lead was a heart. Declarer won, crossed to a club and finessed the diamond. The defence was dead.

Isnt bridge so pretty ?


Tomorrow : The second hand and an admission that I lied about something in this post.

2 comments:

  1. Sartaj, at the very least you lied about posting the second hand "tomorrow"!. I also don't find the 1NT bid by South "pretty", but that is a matter of opinion...

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  2. haha....ok will get onto it sometime tonight

    ReplyDelete