Things are clearly winding down at the Bridge Club as we head towards summer — there are, however, two events of note in June.

The first is the Worldwide Bridge Contest where the Club is intending to hold two separate events — the first on Friday evening June 6th is definitely on and the second on the Saturday afternoon will only be held if there is sufficient interest — there is a sign-up sheet posted at the Club for the Saturday event.

The next week will see the holding of the Bermuda Sectional from June 13th — 16th and details will be provided here closer to the time.

This week’s hand has lessons in the bidding and the play.

Dealer North. East West vulnerable

(Spades / Hearts / Diamonds / Clubs)

North: A1053 / J5 / A9873 / 93

East: None / 1087643 / KJ/ Q10875

South: KQJ98642 / Q / Q6/ K2

West: 7 / AK92 / 10542 / AJ64

After two passes by North and East, South made the good decision to put the pressure on the opponents by bidding 4 Spades!

The vulnerability and South’s pre-emptive opening bid conspired to keep East-West out of the auction where 12 tricks, rather fortunately, are available in hearts. So North-South were already ahead on this hand.

West led the king of hearts and shifted to the two of diamonds.

As the cards lay, playing low from dummy would have been fatal: East would win the trick with the king of diamonds and shift to a club, giving the defenders four tricks before declarer gained the lead.

Seeing this, instead of playing low at trick two declarer called for dummy’s ace of diamonds and then led dummy’s jack of hearts at trick three, throwing the queen of diamonds from hand.

This loser-on-loser gave declarer a real chance of establishing a long card in diamonds without letting East gain the lead.

West won that trick with the ace of hearts and shifted to his seven of trumps. Declarer took this with dummy’s ten and followed with the six from hand — a key play for entry purposes.

After ruffing a diamond high, declarer led the two of trumps to dummy’s three to ruff another diamond high.

Next came the four of trumps to dummy’s five to ruff a third diamond, thereby establishing dummy’s last diamond as a winner.

All that remained for declarer to do was to cross to dummy with the ace of trumps and discard a club on the good diamond.

If the diamonds had broken 5-1, declarer would have had to hope that the ace of clubs was onside.

Great play by declarer and a massive top which beat every other result in the field!