Friday, May 05, 2006

Bidding for the lead

Here's a hand from an online team match.

You hold 32 KQJ9 QJT8 543. LHO dealer, we are NV vs V.
The bidding starts:
1 - pass - 2 - ...

Your turn, what do you bid? Most players will just pass, and right they are. At the table however I found a nice bid: 3! LHO bid 4 (as I expected) and that ended the auction.

Dealer:North
Vul:NS
Scoring:imps
KQ974
A76
A32
KJ
32
KQJ9
QJT8
543
AT5
T54
654
Q987
J86
832
K97
AT62

Partner obviously lead a which gave declarer a very hard time. He took the Ace at trick 1 and played to my partner's Ace. He returned another and I cashed K and Q, seeing that the were splitting 3-3. Now, having 3 tricks already, I passively played and declarer had to find Q without much information.
With any other lead (except A followed by a ) declarer can easily discard a loser on his without losing control of the hand, so he can hardly make any mistake. Now he placed Q with me and went down.

What would've happened in 3x? I guess I'd go down 1 too much, but how will they find that Double at this vulnerability with small trumps?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

they could not find 3H-X?(small trumps;3-3 split) you mean you could SEE they had only small trumps and in that distribution?