Where did you spend Easter? Skiing in some magical snowy wonderland, sipping schnapps and ladling down the fondue? On a gourmet tour somewhere, sampling the local delicacies and washing them down with copious amounts of plonk? Me? I was at the Royal National Hotel in Russell Square playing the Easter Guardian along with hundreds of other bridge addicts, and having a whale of a time!
There are three different tournaments to play over the four days of Easter and my favourite is the teams. This year 70 teams competed and the winners were Glyn Liggins and Joe Fawcett playing with their wives, Gillian Salt and Sarah Waddington. Congratulations to them.
Between sessions I browsed Brian Senior’s excellent bookstand and found something right up my street: Guy Levé’s Encyclopedia of Card Play Techniques at Bridge. Hundreds of different deals are reproduced, naming and explaining the technique. Here is ‘Forquet’s avoidance play’ named after one of the greatest Italian players of all time.
West led his singleton ♥7 won in hand with the Ace. The only way to secure ten tricks is to ruff a heart in dummy without letting the defence ruff the Ace or King. If declarer plays clubs, attempting to cut communications, East can get the lead twice and give his partner two heart ruffs, felling dummy’s King. The avoidance play consists of going to dummy with the ♦A and playing the ♣2 towards his 10. Now East can get the lead just once in clubs and can only give his partner one ruff. The ♥K will score and West will have trumped thin air. Declarer can now draw trump and still have one in dummy to ruff the fourth heart.
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