Bidding and Playing Notrump Hands
Lesson 3 consists of a dozen hands that will provide practice in card play. In each deal, imagine you are the declarer. Count your sure tricks. Decide where you might look for extras. Plan your order of play before following to the first trick.
¨ some rather testing questions are inserted in the text
Board 1 Dlr N, Nil
NORTH
WEST EAST
ª QT6 ª KJ92
© QJ98 © T62
¨ 87632 ¨ 5
§ 9 § QJT84
SOUTH
ª 87
© 543
¨ AQJ9
§ 763
With a balanced 21 HCP North opens 2NT. And South, holding a balanced 7-count, raises to 3NT because the partnership has the combined 25-32 HCP usually needed to make game, but not slam.
East leads clubs, the longer suit, selecting the top card in the sequence, §Q, to show
partner the jack and ten (or on a bad day the nine instead).
As North, the declarer, you can count ten top tricks - easy stuff. You have one spade, two hearts, five diamonds and two clubs.
What could go wrong? Nothing, as long as you are careful when playing the diamond suit.
It is vital to cash a winner first in the North hand (say, the king, putting dummy's four on it) and next overtake the other honour (the ten) with any higher one in dummy. If you fail to take this essential second step, you will make two diamond tricks instead of five because there is no other way to reach dummy's diamond winners. They will be marooned and you will no longer have enough tricks for your contract.
In bridge jargon, the only 'entry' to dummy's diamond winners is in the diamond suit itself.
Well done if you made an overtrick for a score of 4x30 + 10 + 300 = 430.
¨ If spades had been East's choice of opening lead (not especially recommended), which card would she select from that holding of KJ92?
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