Bridge in the Tri-Cities: Opening Strong

Opening Lead: Seven of clubs

My favorite bidding system is “Precision Club.” It is effective because the opening bidder limits his hand right away and hopeless slams and games are avoided much more often than when using standard methods. Today’s hand came up on a recent Thursday night.

The Bidding: The south hand is much too strong to open with anything but a demand bid. In standard it should be opened with an artificial 2C bid, but in Precision it calls for opening 1C. 2H is game forcing and promises 8 points a distributional hand and at least five spades. 3H denies spades and designates hearts as the trump suit. 3S denies a top heart honor. 3NT asks how many hearts. 4D promises a single heart. Asking bids in the other suits could follow, but the bidding is too high, even though it started as low as possible! 4NT is used as “Key-Card Blackwood.” 5H shows two key cards* and denies the queen of hearts. 5NT promises all five key cards and asks about kings. 6C denies any kings and 6H ends the auction. South would bid 7H if North had one king. If he knew how to ask about a singleton club, he would also bid seven hearts.

The Play: Declarer throws a losing diamond on the ace of spades, ruffs a losing club in dummy and claims all 13 tricks. A trump lead holds it to 12 tricks.

What Happened? The hand was played five times. Two bid and made a small slam in hearts, two ended in 4H, one making seven and the other six. Finally, one stubborn North got to play it in 5S and went down one.

* Key cards are the four aces and the king of trumps.

Bridge Futures: The Richland Duplicate Bridge Club (RDBC) has a game at the Richland Community Center (RCC) at 5:30 p.m. every Monday except holidays. RDBC also plays on the first, third and fifth Friday at 12:30 p.m. at the RCC in the lounge. Call Tom Edwards at 946-1824 for details.

This story was originally published August 27, 2017 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Bridge in the Tri-Cities: Opening Strong."