My Plaintive Lament

	9 8 7 4 10 9 K 9 8 6 3 7 3
A K Q 10 A 8 7 6 3   Q 10 8 4	N   W E   S	6 3 2 J 5 A J 7 4 A K 6 2	West	East
	J 5 K Q 4 2 Q 10 5 2 J 9 5	Board 12. N/SVul. Dealer W	1 2 4 6	2 3NT 4

What do you do when you're having a bad night? Either endure it, or take a chance for a good board, knowing if it goes wrong, it's not going to make your situation worse. That was our dilemma on this board.

Partner dealt as West, and opened one heart, playing 5-card majors. I responded two clubs, guaranteeing 10 points. Partner was now good enough to reverse, game-forcing. Maybe I should not have jumped to three notrumps, but I wanted to show extra values. By doing so, I had reached the game that most other pairs were in. Partner now took a chance with a key-card Gerber bid (counting the King of the highest-ranking suit bid i.e. spades in this case). I showed her two key-cards, so she went six clubs. All the others in the room not in 3NT were in five clubs, and none of them made 12 tricks.

So, it was my chance to shine on the opening lead of the K. My first thoughts were pretty negative. I could see four losers, and that was assuming clubs broke safely. If the spades behaved, a loser could go away on the fourth. I then had the problem of how to get back to hand and ruff two diamonds, as my only entries were in trumps. Maybe by ducking a second heart I could ruff my way back. I therefore called for the ace, and noticed North's 9.

That was interesting. Dummys 6,7, and 8 were now looking useful as I was only missing the 10,Q. I taught my partner from scratch, and my plaintive lament of "the answer to declarer's problems is usually to set up dummy's long suit" (usually uttered after she had failed to make a simple no-trump contract in the early days) came back to me. A second heart to the 10,J, and Q made dummy's suit good. A return allowed me to throw the losing spade, then draw trumps and declare dummy was high.

A nice top, but still not enough to get us in the points that time.