A couble of things that landed on my desk over the last weeks. First, this hand, shown to me by a friend. You are in 6♠ and west leads the ♥K. Is there a way to make this contract?
While you thinking about this, time for a couple of commercials. No, not as funny as this one, just some assorted things about bridge.
This one is for a tournament/pub-crawl in Rotterdam on February 18, 2017. It has been ages since I’ve been in Rotterdam and I never played in this event, but the Oude Haven used to be an nice area when I last visited. So, if the weather participates, it should be fun.
Click here to download the flyer.
Clck here to get in touch with the organizers for more details and to register.
Then, I’m not quite sure how I managed to do this, but I’m now an official agent for G-suite, the set of collaboration tools hosted by Google. If you are considering to use it, here is a referal link and some promotion codes. If you use the link and code, you get a 20% discount in the first year. and, to be honest, I get a few euro’s to continue hosting this site as well. Don’t ask me why Google does this.
Here is the link: https://goo.gl/iKa9Zl, mail me for an access code to go with it.
And finally, I got in touch with a local player who is trying to sell off his book collection of about 1,500 (yes, that is right, 1,500) titles, mainly in English but with a fair amount of Dutch titles as well. He wants to sell this in one big batch. If you are looking for a way to fill your library, get in touch.
The bridge problem.
The club position (♣K9x opposite ♣A10x) suggests an endplay but that suffers from a major and a minor problem. The minor problem is that you will still go down when somebody holds ♣QJx(…) and his partner leads the suit. The major problem is that you cannot eliminate the side suits, you have a heart too much for that.
Is there another possibility? Well, we can place west on the opening lead with ♥KQ. Add the ♥J and ♣QJ to that, plus a few small cards. That gives him something like the hand on the right. Now what happens after 4 rounds of trumps, 3 rounds of diamonds and 2 rounds of hearts? He’ll be left with the ♥J and ♣QJx. Dummy will be down to ♥10 and ♣A9x, declarer has ♠10 and ♣K9x. On the last spade, west will be squeezed in this position:
That is not all, declarer has to take his tricks in the right order. You cannot win the first the ♥A and then give up a heart, as west will win and play a 3rd round, removing the ♥10 from dummy before it becomes a threat card.