Saturday, March 29, 2008

Impress Your Palooka

Your regular partner is busy and you're reduced to playing with a particularly uncouth palooka at the club. At unfavourable vulnerability, you pick up ♠ Q7  AJT7  42 ♣ AKT85 and open 1 ♣ as dealer, with some misgivings about your rebid. Upon hearing 1  from your palooka partner, you bid the automatic 1 . At your next turn—a crashboombang later—you can only pass the palooka's 7 ♣ “rebid”. Your fears are somewhat allayed when dummy hits the table:

♠ AKT
5
AK873
♣ Q972

♠ Q7
AJT7
42
♣ AKT85

Lead: ♠ 5

Your uncouth partner is sure to give it to you unabashedly if you go down. Avoid this sorry fate.

Second, assume your partner bid only 6 ♣. Now how do you take insurance against a volley of abuse?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Playing 7:
Win the lead and cash CA. If trumps are 4-0 on the left, key is to ruff dummy's D good. Ruff them high so you can take C finesses at the end.
If trumps are 4-0 on the right, you have to take a view in the red suits; best is likely to be to ruff two H in dummy and take trump finesses/a trump coup in D.

Playing 6, it's all a lot easier as you only need to protect against freaky breaks in the majors.