Bridge

I hope you had a better (bridge) Christmas than I did. I didn’t play or watch a single hand. But I did do some long-avoided work on suit combinations – the equivalent in boredom of going to the gym. The ping of my phone alerted me to a new email but any distraction would have had me abandoning my tedious homework and running for fun.

It was from my pal Saucepan (Szczepan Smoczynski), who was playing a Pairs tournament in Poland. ‘I’ve got a funny hand for you,’ it said. ‘Two board rounds with barometer scoring [meaning everyone plays the same boards at the same time]. So much for bloody suit combinations!’

He added: ‘Early on in one round, everyone heard a loud groan from one table, and a couple of people started laughing! Just a moment later, another player went “Oh noooooo” and so it continued for a few minutes, by which time half the room was giggling, but what was going on? Some kind of simultaneous food poisoning?’

He was about to find out.

‘I was West,’ he wrote, ‘and had a completely normal lead of the Jack of Spades, which stripped dummy’s entry to the long Diamonds. Declarer won, crossed to hand in Hearts and led a Diamond up. This is a standard situation. I must insert the Queen to kill the suit if declarer has two small, and give him a nasty guess if he has three. An expert player like me will, of course, never miss such an obvious play. So I put up the Queen, and a moment later I couldn’t help but bury my head in my hands and go “Arrrrrrgh”.’

Happy New Year all!