ACES ON BRIDGE

“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.”

— Marcus Aurelius

As East, your two-spade call shows a weak hand with five spades and a minor. You hear South overcall four hearts and North cue-bid five hearts, asking South to bid slam with a spade control.

Against six hearts, your partner leads the spade eight to your 10 and declarer’s ace. Next comes a heart to the queen. How would you proceed with the defense?

Even if your partner is able to ruff the second spade, you can probably wait for your spade trick. Similarly, any slow club winners in partner’s hand will not disappear.

However, if declarer has three diamonds without the queen, you might easily come under pressure on the run of the rounded suits. Forced to keep three diamonds, you would be unable to preserve parity with dummy’s spades, and declarer could ruff out one of your long cards. The only way to break this up is to switch to diamonds, extracting one of dummy’s entries, but you can start by ducking the first heart. Declarer ruffs a spade and then knocks out your heart ace. Only now do you shift to a diamond to the queen and king. Declarer wins that and can run his club and heart winners, whereupon you reduce to two diamonds and one spade, leaving declarer without recourse. However, in the four-card ending, if South still had two diamond entries left to dummy, he would succeed via a ruffing squeeze, with the diamond ace-king and two spades in dummy facing a trump and three diamonds in hand. Whichever suit you unguarded, he would set up.

ANSWER: If you have a tool to show a two-suited hand, such as two spades showing spades and a minor, then use it at any vulnerability. You have two internally strong suits and must compete the part-score or maybe even find a spade sacrifice. If you can show only one suit, it is less appealing to act, as you might not find your best fit.