Bridge | 26 May 2016

If you live in (or anywhere near) London, and you enjoy a good teams tournament, you could do no better than joining one of the excellent SuperLeague games at Young Chelsea or TGRs. There are two divisions in each, played on alternate weeks and two teams get promoted from Div 2 and two go down from Div 1. They are both terrific fun and, junkie that I am, I play in both! This season has just finished after four months and it was the usual nail-biting climax. We won TGRs and at YC it was neck and neck between Hillman and Hinden until the last match. Congratulations to the Hinden team who prevailed.

This year a couple of new players joined my team: Australian Kieran Dyke and young English International Mike Bell. Here is Kieran showing tremendously quick thinking at trick one.

Kieran was sitting South, and received the ♠Queen lead. Spotting the problem is not hard; if East has the ♦Ace and West the ♣Ace there’s a real danger of the defence taking four tricks. Have you seen the antidote?

Kieran did: he ducked smoothly in both hands! Had West been able to see through the cards, he could obviously have shifted to a Diamond and taken the contract two down but, luckily, not many players are blessed with X-ray vision.

West continued naturally enough with another Spade, won by South. Declarer drew two rounds of trumps, ending in dummy, discarded his Diamond on the ♠King, and advanced the ♦King. Had East not covered, South would have discarded a Club, not caring if West won it. When East produced the ♦A, the upshot was a couple of overtricks.