This deal comes from X-Clubs on Thursday 7/08/2025. I seem to find quotations that either don’t mean anything, or are of dubious origin. One that comes to mind this week is “Don’t hide your bushel under a tree” or something like that. I have no idea of the origin nor exactly what it means, but the hiding part seems very appropriate to what took place in a Swiss Pairs session at our club, and was also played in a match point format at other X-clubs. Take a look at the deal.
Board 17. Dealer N Nil Vul
Here is what happened at one table. North opened 1D and South bid 1H. North, for reasons best known to himself, chose to ignore his spade suit and thought it more important to rebid 3D to show “15-17 and a good 6+ diamond suit”. South made the very sensible bid of 3NT, thinking a club lead from West would be better than from East. Well, West did lead a club and declarer looked at dummy in horror. The club went to East’s queen and East returned her own ‘fourth highest’ as per normal instructions. Tip: when you can anticipate that something could go wrong, think again. If East had thought ahead, East would see the coming blockage in clubs, and would have led back the jack and without the blockage the defence would have taken five club tricks before anything else. As it was, the situation for the defence was still not beyond repair. East took two more clubs, on which declarer had to find some discards, from both his own hand and dummy. Two diamonds from his hand and, trying to mislead the defence, two spades from dummy. East now had a problem of what to lead next. She had seen South bid hearts so it was reasonable to lead a spade. With only KJ in dummy, Declarer took the only chance now. He won the jack of spades in dummy and proceeded to run the diamonds. West had to keep his ace of hearts, and when declarer overtook the king of spades with the ace, was gratified to see that his lowly four of spades took the final, and ninth, trick in a contract that should have been down three! West also had hidden his bushel. He should have taken the ace of hearts before leading the third club!
KJT5
K
AKQ943
T7