The Milwaukee Journal – 2 Feb 1950 by Helen Sobel y Sam Fry
This play never actually happened, as far as we know. But we’ve dreamed about its happening to us for so long that we can’t resist putting it in writing.
South dealer; North/South vulnerable.
As dealer we give our all (and a bit more) by opening with three spades.
West doubles. East bids five clubs and that ends the auction.
In our dreams we open the king of spades, and after everyone follows we stop for a survey. We know East to be a solid player and mark him with long solid clubs and the ace of hearts on the bidding. Our only hope of beating the contract, it seems to us, is to got two spade tricks and a heart ruff. Its too much to expect East to have three spades.
But how to get partner in to give the heart ruff?
A look at dummy tells us its got to be in the spade suit or not at all. And a daring play comes to us in a flash. Mere mortals have underled aces or even ace-kings to put partner on lead. And maybe some god of bridge at one time underled an ace, king, queen or ace, king, queen, jack.
But we are going to boldly underlead 150 honors (what’s left of it), and with the nine staring us in the face in dummy to boot! Declarer, of course, will carelessly play the lower card, the six from dummy, not knowing what brilliant skulduggery lies afoot.
So we lead the three of spades, the six is played from dummy and our partner happily has the seven (or eight) left. It was our only chance and it worked! Now for the heart ruff for the setting trick!
In our happy dream partner gives us the ruff and we go on to win the rubber with a slam. But in our nightmare after a welsh rarebit, our partner wins the spade trick with the eight and then malevolently or stupidly we´re never quite sure which, returns a trump.
