A team consisting of players with very minimum tournament experience beat all the other so called strong teams to a pulp, in the recently concluded 2012 Coonoor open. C.Satish Kumar, K. Santhalakshmi, Jayashree, and Manju were the members of the victorious V4 team that scored 119 victory points out of a possible 150 to emerge as champions.
Watch Manju of the winning team in today’s deal where she adopted a line of play purely on intuition and succeeded by a delightful throw-in at the finish.
Contract: 3NT by south. West leads the S 2. East wins with the ace and returns the seven. You try the nine from your hand. West plays the ten and you duck. West exits in S Q to blot the jack in your hand. You put up the king in dummy and east discards a diamond. Plan the play.
Bidding comment: NS have bid their hands rather too well.
Analysis: It appears that you need a bit of luck in clubs; either they should be 3-3 or the nine should be in the hand that has a doubleton club.
Play: After winning the third spade, Manju played the C Q and let it ride. When it won, she had a sneaking suspicion that west was ducking with K-9-x-x. So, she played a heart to the king, cashed C A, and successfully finessed the jack. She then cashed the H A and the two top diamonds, west following with the H Q to the third heart and with the D Q to the second diamond.
The last three-card position was:
It was easy for her to exit in the fourth heart now and endplay east to score the ninth trick through diamond ten. The complete hands were:
Discussion: With only the H K as entry to the long clubs, the technically correct play is to overtake the club queen with the ace and smoke out the king by playing an honour from hand.
While it is generally important to adopt technically correct plays, there will be occasions where one goes by intuition, hunch, suspicion, gut feeling or whatever that you may call them.
When asked about which of the lines of play was correct, an expert was once reported to have said: ‘The one that works!’
While Manju knew that she could overtake the CQ with the ace and dislodge the CK, she had an intuitive feeling that the club suit was divided K-9-x-x in one hand and x-x on the other. She played on that assumption and was proved right.
Luck smiled on her as the adverse cards were distributed as she wanted them to be, thereby enabling her to fulfil the contract.
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