I was thinking about constructing this week’s hand about the “third hand high” play in defence, and suddenly, as happens with me, a bridge hand which I defended against Tony Saunders some 40 years ago randomly flashed  before my eyes!

Tony, of course, has been one of the best players to ever play the game in Bermuda and, if I remember correctly, first represented Bermuda in the World Bridge Olympiad back in 1964. He is really strong technically and a real student of the game, and had something I never did: the ability to be constantly polite to his partners when the heat was on and things go wrong!

Anyway, I was playing with Ralph Thomas against Tony and Dieter Ahrens and we were at the table closest to the kitchen, a totally irrelevant fact but it was part of the image!

Dieter, sitting on my left, opened three diamonds and Tony bid 3NT and I was on lead with this mess: A62, J765, 862, 862 – I was slightly tempted to cash the spade Ace as I suspected a lot of diamonds being cashed, but in the end I led the heart five.

This dummy appeared (see Figure 1).

Partner played the heart nine and Tony won with the Ace (he clearly had AKQ) and we now had to discard on seven diamond tricks. My first seven discards were easy as I followed to three diamonds and pitched one spade and all my clubs – Tony, who started with Ax of diamonds, had  in the meantime pitched four spades (including the King) and one club.

This was now the position between me and dummy (see Figure 2).

Tony now played the Ace-King of clubs and I had two pitches to make. The first was easy, the small spade, but then what?

Did Tony have the spade Queen (he was good enough to false-card by throwing the King)  and King-Queen of hearts left, or did he just have KQx of hearts? It was actually an easy decision – throw the Ace of spades and keep the hearts!

See the full hand in Figure 3.

How was it so easy? Trick 1 was the key, and after that I knew I had to keep hearts – it was clear that Tony had the AKQ of hearts and that partner had played the nine from 109 (lower of two touching cards), as Tony had not won with the ten.

But what the play also told me was that Tony had the eight of hearts, as with 1098 partner would have played  the eight at trick one!  So, Tony had to have the AKQ8 of hearts to start …..hence the pathway to the right defence.

The hand accentuated the need to a) trust partner, b) reconstruct declarer’s hand as much as you can, and c) trust yourself to make the right play even at the risk of looking stupid!

In a future column I will more fully discuss the whole mantra of “third hand high”. It is generally a good guide, but bundles of tricks are given away by players blindly playing their highest card in third seat without trying to figure out what partner might have.

• Stop the press! Success breeds success – after waiting 30 years to win their first club championship last month, Richard and Wendy Gray went one better by winning the Sectional Tournament at the club’s game on Monday which is scored ACBL-wide.

Their 71.48 per cent game was one of two plus-70 per cent games and put them on top of a leaderboard containing 149 pairs – the strength of the win is evidenced by them earning a whopping 17.68 master points for the result. They then kept it going with another win in the local field on Wednesday – bravo!

• David Ezekiel can be reached on davidezekiel999@gmail.com

BRIDGE CLUB RESULTS

Friday, July 4

1 Sancia Garrison/Jane Smith

2 Richard Gray/Wendy Gray

3 Judith Bussell/Charles Hall

Monday, July 7

1 Richard Gray/Wendy Gray

2 Sancia Garrison/Jane Smith

3= Peter Donnellan/Lynanne Bolton

3= Lorna Anderson/Heather Woolf

Tuesday, July 8

North/South

1= John Thorne/Heidi Dyson

1= Sally Irvine/Sandra Ogden

3 Tracey Pitt/Desiree Woods

East/West

1 Gareth Cooper/Maximillian Santiago

2 Malcolm Moseley/Finn Moseley

3 Scott Gilbertson/Ross Cooper

Wednesday, July 9

1 Richard Gray/Wendy Gray

2 Elysa Burland/Magda Farag

3 Patricia Siddle/Diana Diel