| 21st European Youth Team Championships | Page 3 | Bulletin 9 - Saturday 21 July 2007 |
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Championship Stories Second Thoughts Are Always Best - by Barry Rigal Yesterday we saw a deal where Boldrini and Manno overbid a little to the spade grand slam.
After the heart lead, declarer correctly shortened his trumps and then had to guess how many diamonds to cash before playing on clubs. Specifically, the play went: heart to the ace, spade ace, heart ruff, top spade finding the bad break. Then diamond jack, heart ruff, and a second top diamond, for the moment of truth. Declarer tried to cash a third diamond and went down. Brian Senior defended this line as being with the percentages as opposed to playing on clubs. Up to a point, Lord Copper; but as the Irishman said when asked how to get to Killarney “If I were you I would not start from here”. The correct line is to start as Boldrini did. Heart ace, spade ace heart ruff, top spade. But now you play the club jack, cross to the club queen, and reach this ending:
At this point in the deal, West is known to have four spades and two plus hearts with two plus clubs, and declarer can succeed on every lie of the cards except a 4-5-2-2 pattern with West – when nothing sensible would have worked. The key play now is simply to ruff a club not a heart to shorten your trumps down to the key length. Then you play diamond ace and a diamond to the jack, and have two guaranteed winning clubs in dummy to pitch your diamonds on, with the lead in dummy at trick 12 for the coup. Grand Auction - by Patrick Jourdain Stuart Haring and Simon Cope of the England Junior team had a sophisticated auction to reach this grand slam from Round 12:
Open Room
2♠ = Fit-jump forcing for one round Haring opened a natural One Diamond on the West cards. The response of Two Spades promised five cards in spades and a raise to at least Three Diamonds, forcing for one round. West’s rebid showed he would not have accepted an invitation. Now East’s Four Hearts was a splinter with slam interest. South’s double allowed West to Pass and East’s redouble promised first round control. This gave West the necessary information to use Keycard. When East’s response showed the three missing keycards and confirmed the void heart West, knowing his side had at least ten trumps, did not need to ask for the trump queen. There was no problem in the play. |
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