A Charmed Life

Minnie van Driver had been playing at the club for almost a month and was now reliably sorting her cards into suits, rarely revoking, and only bidding out of turn three or four times per session. Even with that improvement it was hard to explain why she was getting such good results. She seemed to lead a charmed life with all her errors leading to inadvertent brilliancies. A typical example was this hand she played in 5♦ as West.

♠42 ♥T42 ♦KQT72 ♣KQJ		♠AKJ3 ♥87 ♦A96 ♣A982

North began proceedings by cashing the ♥A and ♥K and then played a third heart which Minnie had the sense to ruff in dummy. She then played the Ace and King of trumps and noticed that North discarded a small heart on the second trump. “Oh good” she thought, “I must have got all those nasty opponents’ trumps by now”. She had not noticed that South remained with J 8 in trumps (an apparently certain trick since dummy was out of trumps and she couldn’t therefore finesse).

So with the peaceful happiness of one overseen by a fairy godmother she began playing out her clubs. After taking the ♣KQJ she crossed to dummy with the ♠A. These cards remained:

♠4 ♥— ♦QT7 ♣—		♠KJ3 ♥— ♦— ♣A

She now played the ♣A and ruffed it by mistake. Very flustered to have “wasted a trump” she next played a spade to the King. Now the lead was in dummy and the cards were

♠- ♥— ♦QT ♣		♠J3 ♥— ♦— ♣—

with South retaining ♦J8. When Minnie played a spade from dummy she was surprised to see South ruff; but she merely over-ruffed and won both the last two tricks.

As her partner Sinclair Whitlands pointed out in admiration she had executed a grand coup. But Minnie displayed only a becoming surprise at being the only declarer to succeed. She had got used to Sinclair’s florid language by now and thought he was talking about someone killing a rather noisy pigeon.

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