Bridge | 13 July 2017

Here’s one of my favourite hands from the European Open Championships — although it caused David Gold to spend the next hour kicking himself. David is a world-class player, but even Homer nods, and after days competing in a sweltering tent in the Tuscan countryside, he made a small error which led him to go down in a slam. He realised it a second later — exactly the same time as one of our opponents, the Russian champion Andrey Gromov, who leaned over to point it out, only for David to cut him short with a forlorn ‘I know’. Mind you, only an expert would consider it an error; most of us would never have spotted it. Indeed, I had no idea what he meant until he drew the five-card ending for me:
 
David (North) bid diamonds first (an artificial response to my strong 2♣), so he was declarer. Incidentally, West (Gromov) made a fantastic bid of 4♥: a heart lead always beats the contract.