Counting Hand Maneuvers by Fernando Lema

Photo: Brazil Worl Champion, with his Bermuda Bowl.

May 17 2013

Next Saturday May 25, 2013 will start the 63 º South American Bridge Championship, qualifier for the World Championships; Bali (IND).

Official Site, Angra 2013: http://angra2013.csbnews.org/

 This year I’m lucky enough to play the South American Open Pairs with WGM Pedro Castelo Branco (BRZ) and we are using BBO to practice a little.

On Thursday 16 in a match training, we shared the table with two great masters: in West Marcos Toma member of the Brazil Team and in East Joaquin Pacareu member of the Chile Team (No. 2  Southamerican Ranking) this is what happened in board 3:

Teams, Dealer: West,  North/South Vulnerable

West	North	East	South
Marcos Toma	Fernando Lema	Joaquin Pacareu	Pedro Branco
2	Doblo	4	4
Paso	Paso	Paso

Contract: 4

Lead: 10

Pedro won the lead with the A, played the K and continued with another heart, watching East playing his 2. Pedro stopped for a while to analyze the situation, he knew now that West had 2 heart winners, so he only could afford to lose one diamond trick.

He continued playing a club to the J, the two defenders played clubs, and now: “West originally had: 1-4-6-2 or 0-4-6-3?, he knew he had 4 trumps and two clubs”.

To verify Pedro played his A and both defenders served spade. Now any good player would have thought that West original distribution was 1-4-6-2…and would have missed the procedure.

If we remove from Marco’s hand the spade and the two clubs,  he would stay with two heart honors and 6 diamond cards, so playing club until the end, he can ruff at any point, but he will find himself obliged to play diamond to declarer’s king. Error!, Playing that way the declarer goes one down as we will see, because declarer needs no safe card to lead from Marco’s Hand.

 Pedro showing his World Champion category gave us a class, and to ensure the distribution he played another spade, ruffed in his hand, and saw West playing the 10!.

 Now the end was inevitable, West had a 2-4-5-2 hand, and Pedro continued with the K, vitamina ruffed, played his second trump honor, the A and gave the rest of the tricks, and 12 IMPs for our team.

The 3 masters did their best to win the hand. The cunning Marcos known as “vitamin” opened with only 5 cards in the diamond suit, Joaquin (Paca) suspicious of our good fit in heart, jumped to 4 Diamonds with only 3 cards!!, and Pedro gives us a technique class, this board was a battle of cunning and very good bridge, and I had fun from start to finish

The four hands were:

Esta entrada también está disponible en: Spanish