For Cora … the joy of bridge

Malcolm and Jason are heading home today. Malcolm being my grandson and Jason my son-in-law. So its back to work. I will do a Rodwell column tomorrow but for today I wanted to write a blog for Cora.

The joy of bridge is not in being perfect. As has been said many times bridge is a game of mistakes or famously “none of us are any good at this game”. The joy of bridge is in executing something well and winning a board. It makes up for a lot of the mistakes.

Here is a deal where Cora and I won 12 imps when we bid to the right slam and she played it carefully to make it.  I have rotated the cards to make Cora South.

Linda ♠ AKJ842 ♥ Q ♦ AK2 ♣ AKQ

Cora ♠ 6 ♥ AK10972 ♦ 1064 ♣ J86

With both vulnerable Cora opened a weak two hearts.  I have 26 high card points and the useful ♥ Q.  The problem with this type of hand is that it may be quite hard to get to Cora’s hand.  So I decided to try 2NT, asking for an outside card, in case Cora had a useful side card.  When she bid 3♥ she was going to have to have very solid hearts for me to run the heart suit after overtaking my heart queen.   it seemed best to play it in hearts.

If she had no heart losers we did have 13 tricks: 2 spades, 2 diamonds, 3 clubs and 6 hearts.  I could bid 4NT and if she showed up with the top two honors I could take a shot at the grand slam in hearts.  But we were missing six hearts which meant that hearts were most likely to break 4-2 and she could still be off a trump losers.  It also might be fairly inconvenient to get to her hand to finish drawing trump after cashing the ♥ Q.

Let’s say she has xx AKJxxx xxx xx.  She can’t get back to hand without giving the opponents a chance to ruff in.   I just bid 6♥ . Call me chicken but I figured that we might get quite a good result just for playing in hearts since players in notrump could have quite a lot less than 13 tricks.

Cora got a spade lead and played it very carefully.  She knew that she had enough winners.  She just had to avoid two trump losers.  She won the spade lead and cashed the ♥ Q and then ruffed a spade back to hand with the ♥ 10.  She played the top two hearts and West showed out.  She then made the careful play of giving West his trump trick and after that she could just claim.

Notice that even if hearts are 3-3 people in notrump are not going to do well even at the 6 level.  As it turned out there were quite a lot of people playing notrump.

So even when things don’t go perfectly in a session there is often something fun to look back at.