Dundas

As well as playing the second division in the west district league with Norman, I'm going to be making regular appearances for Jake Corry's Merchiston team on the East coast. We played a match yesterday against Derek Sanders Dundas team, who were a close 3rd in the division last year (having been docked a point for some reason). Last night, I played with Martin Stephens. Our team was carried to a very close 70 point victory by Yvonne Wiseman and Dougie Piper, who were the only one of our three pairs to finish with a positive score (Martin and I were sitting the same way as them).

I should probably have bid the slam on this board, but basically I didn't trust my partner enough. After further discussion, it's clear that I was probably right not to trust him, but that's beside the point...

After Martin's 1♥ response, I was always going to bid 4♥ at least. I was slightly put off the idea of slam by the double on my left, but I figured why not bid 3♠ anyway, and see what happens. What happened was that Martin made a 3NT bid. I think this should probably just be the bid he makes with any hand that might have slam interest opposite a ♠ splinter (maybe saving the cue-bids for non-serious slam interest?). In which case, my hand is pretty good - if partner has no wastage in spades, we either have no ♠ loser, or we have a significant majority of the remaining 30 points. I think the slam is unlikely to be worse than on a finesse if 3NT is intended as a serious slam try.

However, I was worried at the time that partner might have bid 3NT with a balanced 4432 with something like KJTx of ♠s, which does not look so good opposite my hand... In the pub, Martin conceded that he might have bid this way with that hand, so I'm not sure if I was right to pass or not.

Martin did play in a slam on this board:

Following the lead of a ♦ to his ace, Martin took the perfectly reasonable > 75% line of taking two finesses, to drift a quiet one off. Dougie Piper, sitting North for us at table 1, gained 1430 points, which was nearly the entirety of their plus score, by playing a ♠ to the A at trick 2! He actually ended up with 13 tricks, when the opponents didn't discard optimally on the run of the ♠s. 

It's not completely clear which is the best line. Your play doesn't matter if the ♥K is onside, as you're pretty much always going to be able take a ♥ finesse. Both are fine when W has a ♠K singleton. Dougie's line loses when W has Kx in ♠s and E the ♥K. However, it gains whenever East has stiff ♠K, and also a lot of the time when E has Kx in ♠s - basically, any time you can get rid of all your minor suit cards before he can ruff in, ie, as long as he has at least 3 in each minor. 

So it actually looks like Dougie's line is probably best, as it picks up almost all of the holdings where E has the ♠K and, unlike the double-hook, doesn't lose to the ♠K singleton in the wrong hand. However, I'm not going to fault Martin for taking his safe 75%.

As I said, we scraped a very narrow victory in the match, which is a good start to the season in one of our toughest encounters. I'm headed to Martin's house tomorrow for more bridge - a teams match including 3 full Scottish internationals, which in theory would make this one of the highest standard games I'll play in all year. On the other hand, I think people are likely to be paying more attention to Martin's 2 week old baby than the bridge, so we'll see how that works out.