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In continuation of my theme around the “art” of opening leads that sometimes will lead to stark differences in results, I provide the following deal. There are normally many examples in your daily games where choice of opening lead can lead to making or defeating a contract, or impact under and overtricks. There are less examples however where your choice of opening lead has a significant wide range of scoring results. Such a hand occurred quite a few years ago at the Monday night Swiss Team game at the Wilmington bridge club. This game was popular due to being an imp game and catered to working folks that weren’t readily available for day games. This game was popular and well attended consisting of playing four matches of 6 boards each.
Before I get to the hand, I wanted to share a very rare occurrence that happened during one of these Monday night games. I was playing with a regular partner and my teammates at the other table included the legendary Dave Treadwell. Dave, who has seen every hand in his career 😊, agreed that he has never seen the results that happened on that night. We won all four of our matches and held our opponents to zero imps for the night. Not only was that a rare occurrence, but our team actually did not win the event! Wow!
Deal #2: So back to the example hand. I was playing with one of my non-regular partners in this Monday night Swiss Team game. Unfortunately for us, he was not aware of my occasional propensity to make “creative” bids during the auction. To our chagrin, he quickly made what he thought was the right lead based on the auction leading our side to lose 20 imps! If one stops to think a little deeper before making your opening lead (highly recommended), then our side could have won 16 imps instead on this one board! Well, how is this possible? Before we find out, it is your turn to review the auction and your hand, then provide your top 3 choices for opening leads to see how you make out!
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