North Penn Bridge News

Greetings to the

North Penn Bridge Community!

Week of 11/14/2022

From the Club Manager

Dave Dodgson

November 14-18 – StaC week. Silver points awarded.

November 24 - Thanksgiving. The club will be closed on Thanksgiving but open the rest of the week.

December 7 & 8 - non-life master sectional. Click here for flyer with details.

Holiday Parties. December 12 - Open game party, December 14 - Shuffle and Deal party and December 16 - 0-750 party. Save the dates and look for further details soon.

Soda Sales. The club is happy to provide sodas, but please be reminded that the cost per soda is 50 cents. There is a collection cup beside the refrigerator. Thanks everyone.

Elections

The 3-year terms for three of our NPDBC Directors end December 31, 2022. We have received nominations for the following members to serve on the Board of Governors from January 1, 2023 to December 31, 2025. The nominees are Roger Milton, Elaine Clair and Dennis O’Brien. Any additional nominations must be made prior to November 18 and a final slate will be published in next week’s email. Per the Club Bylaws, if there are an equal number of candidates for vacancies, voting by secret ballot will be suspended and candidates will be elected by acclamation.

Education

Shuffle and Deal continues to be very popular on Wednesday mornings from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. All players are welcome!

Partnership

To add your name to the player list or to request a partner for a game, please send an email to northpennpartner@gmail.com.

Calendar

Click here to see a file you can enlarge.

We update our Facebook page regularly so be sure to check it out. It’s a great way to stay in touch with all the happenings at North Penn.

Tidbits

“Beware of tipping declarer off about the nature of your hand with your discards. The first discard chosen by most defenders is from a 5-card or longer suit. Astute declarers often use that as the basis for planning their play.”

From 100 Winning Bridge Tips

by Ron Klinger

Deal of the Week

by Bucky Sydnor

Declarer's Mission: Creating Tricks

When we take up bridge initially, we learn to simply take tricks. Soon thereafter we move on to how to create tricks that were not there. A good example is the finesse. When we have the AK of a suit, we have two sure tricks. But when we have the AQ of the suit instead, we only have 1 sure trick. By taking the finesse, if it wins, we have, in effect, created a trick, but we only had 1 sure trick. But we ended up with two.

As we acquire more techniques for creating tricks, we learn the endplay, whereby we throw a defender in who has to make a lead that gives us a trick we could not get on our own. The endplay is a more advanced example of creating a trick.

In a suit contract, one can create tricks by ruffing, but there are also ways to ruff that do not create tricks. For example, if this is your trump suit in a spade contract:

-----♠AKQJ10-----♠987

If you simply draw trumps, no matter whether they break 3-2 or 4-1 or 5-0, you will get 5 spade tricks. If there is a singleton in Declarer’s hand, and Declarer ruffs once in her hand and then plays her other 4 trumps, she still has only 5 tricks. She has not created a trick by ruffing in her hand.

But if Declarer could ruff in dummy, that would give her a 6^th trick. Ruffing in the hand that has fewer trumps is a way to create tricks in a suit contract. There is an important caveat, however, that we will get to in a minute.

Today’s West finds himself declaring 4♥ and getting the helpful lead of the ♠5. Counting losers, West had 1 possible spade loser, 1 sure heart loser (♥A) and 1 possible heart loser (♥J), 1 sure and 1 possible diamond loser, and no club losers. That’s 3 possible losers and 2 sure losers. To make ten tricks, Declarer has to get rid of 2 of the 3 possible losers.

Note that there are as many as TWO diamond losers. With only 8 hearts between the two hands, Declarer will have to draw at least three rounds of trumps. If Declarer draws trumps immediately (or even starts drawing them), he will lose two of the 3 diamonds in his hand.

In order to eliminate the “possible” second diamond loser, Declarer needs to ruff one in Dummy. So far, so obvious. Now the key point: he must go to work on diamonds immediately, before drawing trump. [If you want an example of playing the spade suit for a second round before working on diamonds, click here. Once Declarer has stripped dummy of Diamonds and he has ruffed his third diamond in dummy, then and only then can he work on drawing trump. Time after time I observe players who do not foresee the need to make this play.

Moreover, if you move around to the defenders’ side, you can see that an important defense is to prevent Declarer from being able to ruff in the Dummy (or the hand with the fewer trump). It, of course, involves leading trumps, so the execution can be more complicated that it might seem. Today’s deal is not a good example of that defense as North has 4 trump and 2 natural trump tricks, so leading trumps would be giving up a trick to gain a trick, which is not a great bargain. But on many deals, it is important for the defense to lead trump to prevent Declarer from creating this type of trick for himself. Watch for it at the table, especially when your opponents do it against you. The pain of having them prevent you from creating an important trick can burn it into your mind and help you to use the same defense on other, appropriate deals.

Two final notes about counting tricks. On this deal, when counting losers in the heart suit, it is important to realize that the ♥J is a potential loser. Whenever you have a KQ10 holding in a suit, however they are distributed between Declarer’s hand and Dummy’s hand (but as long as the 10 is with one of the other honors), one of your jobs as declarer is to try to find the jack. If you fail, it becomes a loser. That possibility needs to be included in your initial count of losers.

Secondly, after the spade lead, the play of Dummy’s ♠10 and South’s ♠K, it is important to see that Declarer stills has a potential spade loser on the 4^th round of spades. If Declarer had realized this when he cashed the ♠Q and North followed with the 2 (a doubleton for sure), he might have recognized the need to finesse the ♣Q to get rid of the spade loser, the first way many of us learned to create a trick. At first glance the finesse seems unnecessary, as Declarer only has a singleton club, but in the quest to create tricks sometimes we have to take risks.

With that I will leave you to your mission as Declarer: creating tricks.

Best of luck.

Laughter is the Best Medicine

After I apologize to my partner, Billy Eisenberg, for overbidding he says (after having overbid on the same hand): "That's o.k, we deserve each other."

Bridge humor from

Eddie Kantar