After the excitement of last week’s result in the Mixed Pairs, the tournament season takes a short break and returns with the Men’s Pairs and the Ladies’ Pairs which will be held over two sessions on Saturday, June 13 — hopefully there will be enough pairs in the men’s section to have a game.

The difficulty in getting up a men’s field is something that has crept up on us over the years — I remember a time, somewhere in the last century, when I was tournament director at the club and received some harsh words from a couple of ladies because I called off the ladies’ pairs as only five pairs showed up, whereas there were 12 tables in the men’s!

Much has changed since then — women started to play more and devote more time to the game and as a result there is no discernible difference any longer in the standard of the two fields which would require separate events — but that is a tricky problem given the history of the club tournaments.

I don’t want to get into mortality rates and other morbid stuff, but all of that plays into where we are.

Nevertheless, no matter how big or small the field you have to beat everyone else to win, and that is what all the entrants will be striving for — we will hopefully see all the good pairings in the field which should make for an exciting outcome.

Before I get to the hand, congratulations to Ross Cooper and Desiree Woods who had a plus 70 per cent game on April 28 — a great score of 72.86 per cent, well done!

Today’s hand needed quite a lot of thought at the table and one declarer got it right and the other one….. didn’t! The winning declarer, whether he knew it or not, was successful because he employed the not very elegant sounding “Dentist’s Coup”! Read on ….

South opened two spades, West overcalled three hearts and North’s bid of four spades closed the bidding.

This was a Teams game and at both tables West led the King of hearts, asking for a count signal in the suit. Both East signalled that they had begun with an odd number of hearts.

West continued with the Ace and Queen of hearts, declarer ruffing the third round with dummy’s two of trumps. The problem now was finding entries to the South hand to draw trumps — the first declarer continued with King of trumps and the Ace-King of diamonds.

His next move was to try and reach his hand by ruffing a diamond, which turned out not to be best for his side. West overruffed the third diamond and exited with a club, locking the lead in dummy. Declarer cashed the Ace and King of clubs next and tried to reach his hand with a club ruff. This promoted a second trump trick for West, defeating the contract.

At the other table, declarer began the same way by cashing two diamonds. However, instead of trying to ruff a diamond to try and get to his hand, this declarer cashed the spade King and continued with the Ace and King of clubs, not caring if either was ruffed by West, for that would leave only two trumps outstanding.

When they held, declarer ruffed a diamond, which West overruffed. While that was a small disappointment, the good news for declarer was that he had only had trumps remaining, and his honours there guaranteed that he could claim the rest of the tricks and his contract.

Why is this called the “Dentist’s Coup”? Because declarer “extracted” West’s “teeth” by making him ruff with a natural trump trick! Yes, a bit of a stretch, but I didn’t do the naming!

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

BRIDGE CLUB RESULTS

Monday, May 25

North/South

1 Louise Rodger/Molly Taussig

2 Gertrude Barker/Caitlin Conyers

3 Betsy Baillie/Joyce Pearson

East/West

1 Tracy Nash/Desmond Nash

2 Sancia Garrison/Lynanne Bolton

3= Lorna Anderson/Heather Woolf

3= Patricia Siddle/Diana Diel

Tuesday, May 26

North/South

1 Ross Cooper/Desiree Woods

2 Tracey Pitt/David Leach

East/West

1 Julia Tadman/Joshimar Hussey

2 Veronica Boyce/Carol Eastham

Wednesday, May 27

North/South

1 Gertrude Barker/Jane Smith

2 Richard Gray/Wendy Gray

East/West

1 Betsy Baillie/Sharon Shanahan

2 Tracy Nash/Desmond Nash

Thursday, May 28

1 Miodrag Novakovic/Margaret Way

2 Stephen Cosham/Desmond Nash

3 Claude Guay/Sharon Shanahan