Ottawa Citizen – 26 Feb 1987 By Ted Horning
Yesterday’s column showed how experts can make errors just like other lesser players. Today’s hand features an obvious disaster. As you will see, even at that level, bidding misunderstandings (the greatest source of experts’ errors) are far from rare.
South deals NS vulnerable
Opening lead: three of diamonds
The auction started out in a reasonably natural fashion. North’s rebid of two diamonds was fourth suit forcing. That is a convention used by many players to show a hand of at least game forcing strength. The fourth suit as an artificial force is generally used for two reasons. The first purpose of this convention is for a hand like North’s. North has the values to be in game opposite an opening bid.
He does not know, however, which game would have the best chances of success. Three no trump and four hearts are the most likely final contracts from North’s point of view, but four spades and five clubs are also possible games. The fourth suit gives South room to further describe his hand so that North can make an intelligent decision.
South next jumped to three hearts. As he had bid two suits and strongly raised the third, this action strongly suggested either a singleton or void in the fourth suit, diamonds. With all working cards. North decided to make a slam try and cue bid his ace of spades. This bid caused a lot of confusion.
The other purpose of fourth suit forcing is for a hand with a big fit in one of the opener suits, but too good a hand just to bid game. South thought that North was making a slam try in spades. Consequently South drove to the spade slam.
As you can see, six hearts is cold while six spades, on the lie of the cards, goes down. In fact six spades went down four after the defence played two rounds of diamonds. Declarer ruffed and tried to draw trump. When spades divided 4-2, the hand fell apart, South started hearts but West ruffed the second heart and cashed three more diamonds. So experts have bidding disasters just like you. What makes them experts is that these misunderstandings are infrequent and are resolved to avoid recurrence.