Most of you will be familiar with the term "passive defence", when the defence don't try to engineer anything and just make Declarer do all the work. Well two can play at that game, and sometimes Declarer needs to do much the same thing (well, try to, anyway):
Game All, Dealer SouthYou are South and opened 1
, West bid 1NT and Partner bid 2
, which ended the auction:
North (Dummy) 1093
J532
96
A832
4 ledSouth A8764
K1076
A8
Q10
How do you rate your prospect? Not good was my first reaction, because I want to lead Clubs and Hearts towards my hand, but can't get across to Dummy to achieve that. I'd have been quite happy (at that stage) to come out losing only -100 on this hand LOL. I decided to try to make West do all the work (if he would co-operate).
East played the
King and I won trick 1 with the Ace and simply led back a Diamond, hoping that West would win the trick (which he did, with the Queen). I was quite glad to see the
King, to be honest, because it limited what else
East could turn up with. West switched to the Club Jack and I ducked in Dummy, making the
assumption that West had the King (because I
needed West to have it - if
East had the
King, West would pretty much have to have everything else,
AQ and possibly even
KQJx and I was irrevocably doomed. If West had
KJ(xx), there was scope for East to have cards like the
Queen and possibly even a Spade honour).
So I ducked in Dummy and my
Queen won the trick Now I tried a small Spade towards Dummy, which was won by East's Jack, and East continued Spades (for which I was profoundly grateful because it meant the Spades were 3-2
). I went up with the Ace and played a 3rd round of the suit. Again I was trying to be totally passive and make EW do all the work here.
East might have played on Diamonds, but I think my return at trick 2 might have convinced him that
I had started with 4 Diamonds (which actually was extremely unlikely in view of my failure to try to ruff any of them). I was hoping he
might play Partner for the
10 and switch to a small Club, but he went one better and switched to a
small Heart, which ran to East's Queen and my King.
The rest was plain sailing and I simply conceded a trick to the Ace of Hearts and claimed the rest for an
overtrick, more than I had any right to expect from this hand.
Sometimes, especially when one opponent is known to have most of the outstanding points, it really can pay to simply make or to try to persuade
them to open suits up. On this occasion West did me proud! LOL
