The thrill of thinking ahead

You have:



And partner opens 1♥!



Wow‼ You were planning to fit in hearts and now partner tells you she has also spades. Question: is 2♠ a reverse ? Depends who you ask.

For partner and me, it is only showing shape. Opener might have extras, we will know later.

So now, what do you do? Do you give fit in hearts or spades? Everybody knows 4-4 fit is better, because on the 5-3 fit, the 2 extra cards will serve to discard losers for the other hand. So you go ahead and bid 3♠.



What is partner doing? She is saying she has a nice hand, but no control in clubs. As you have all suits under control, you KCB.



Now it hits you. What does hit you? Which card would you now like to know about in partner's hand? The Heart Queen. Does she have the heart Queen? If you could know that, you would be able to bid 7. But how? You have discussed about asking bids, but you are not on firm grounds in that department. If you bid now 6♥, is it an asking bid, or to play?

So, you settle for 6♠. Now let's go back for a bit and see what we could have done better.

After 2♠, you were so excited by this double fit that you lost your concentration. What did you do wrong? With spade as trumps, as we saw, you will ask keys, but how will you know if partner has the Queen of hearts? How can we find that out? Well, Eric Kokish once wrote an article about a hand where he set a false trump suit in order to collect the information he needed in another suit. I did that also once, wrote an article about it with this title: Hommage to Eric Kokish. Alas, I don't have that article anymore (I am pretty sloppy with things and quite lazy also).

So lets go back to our hands and instead of 3♠, let's bid 3♥.



As I say all the time, we tend to play too fast at bridge. I once lost a chess tournament game by playing too fast. What's so special about that, you are asking? It was a game by correspondence!

In bridge, the pleasure, the exhilaration, is not in the result, it is in the journey. So take your time: think, think and think again before making a bid or a play. Enjoy the thrill of thinking ahead, and savour the surprise of your partner when you will put her in 7♠!