Paint a picture
Janet de Botton
Wednesday nights have begun to loom large in the London bridge calendar. TGR’s has just started a weekly ‘Super-League’ where ten invited teams are battling against each other over nine weeks. The standard is high, the atmosphere friendly and the desire to do well palpable.
This week’s hand features a bit of a taboo subject — false carding. We all know what it means and feel a little smug frisson when it works but, as with psyching, you should pick the right moment. One member of my team falls for it every time, wailing, ‘they false carded’ while the rest of us roll our eyes. I won’t name and shame but I’m very tempted!
The best way to succeed is to know what picture you want to paint of your hand and then execute it in tempo. Irving Gordon (Haggis to his friends), a Scottish International, made just such a picture and found a brilliant false card in his four spade contract.
West led the ♣4, an obvious singleton, and declarer could see that after scoring a club ruff the defence was going to take four tricks if West held the ♥K, which seemed highly likely on the bidding. When East won the ♣A, Irving came up with a stunning play — he dropped his ♣K under it! West looked certain to have led from a doubleton so naturally East looked elsewhere for tricks and switched to his singleton heart wouldn’t you? Declarer jumped in with the ♥A, drew trumps and could eventually discard his small club on either of dummy’s red suit winners.
Thanks Haggis. Of course, it was against my team and three pairs of eyes are still rolling! q
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