Wednesday, March 17, 2010

A nice 6-card ending

Reno was a disappointment for me, but congrats to Franco and Andy as the inaugural Platinum pairs champs. (Most of you have seen Franco's blog, linked from this page.)

A nice catalog of pretty double-dummy 5-card endings with some practical value is George Coffin’s “Great 88,” reproduced at Richard Pavlicek’s web site here.

A 6-card ending worthy of Coffin came up last week at the GNT. I’ll give it as a single-dummy problem.

North: AKx AJ7xx 3 Q9xx
South: xxx Tx KJT82 AKx

N-S arrived at 3nt via an uncontested auction where South opened 1D and rebid 1NT, then North relayed to reveal his exact shape and South chose 3nt.
The play began SQ ducked; spade to dummy; diamond to J and Q; D9 to T; DK to East’s A (West pitched club);spade to dummy (West pitched heart); club to A (both following). This left:
N: --- AJ7 --- Q9x
S: ---- Tx 82 Kx

with declarer having taken 4 tricks, and looking at 4 more. How should declarer continue?

2 comments:

Franco said...

Very cute. I believe I have it, but won't post the spoiler.

Franco said...

Wait, not yet. At least not sure-tricks, but maybe it's not a sure-tricks problem.