Minnie’s first tournament

Having played for several weeks in the club Minnie van Driver was beginning to feel a little more comfortable at the table. True, she still needed recourse to her smelling salts when the bidding became too high but her card play was improving by the day. Indeed it had been over a week since she had last revoked and she was now perfectly capable of counting trumps to within a card or two. So when Sinclair Whitlands asked whether she would play a tournament at the club she accepted with just the briefest of heart palpitations.

Their first hand was played against Mr and Mrs Batarde, visitors from Louisiana whose name was a corruption of an epithet that many thought they deserved.

	♠K764 ♥T83 ♦AJ2 ♣AQ3
♠QT52 ♥54 ♦— ♣KJ87642		♠J9 ♥J62 ♦T9853 ♣T95
	♠A83 ♥AKQ97 ♦KQ764 ♣—

Minnie, who was South, found herself as declarer in the exalted contract of 7♥ and received a small spade lead. Still shaking from the auction she overcame her near swoon and studied the dummy intently. Everything looked good so long as hearts divided 3–2. She was unaware of the dreadful break in diamonds and counted 2 spades, 5 hearts, 5 diamonds, and a club.

Winning the spade lead in dummy she drew two rounds of trumps to which both opponents followed suit. Overcome by relief she claimed 13 tricks. But Mr Bastarde, East, in a silky unpleasant voice, revealed that he still had a trump outstanding. Minnie was mortified. She even knew of the outstanding trump but had neglected to specify her line of play and so the director was called.

The director, who was somewhat inexperienced and intimidated by the Bastards, ruled that Minnie had to play out the hand without drawing the outstanding trump.

So Minnie played 5 rounds of diamonds ruffing the fifth in dummy. Then she played ♣A, on which she discarded a spade, and returned to her hand with ♠A. Holding only trumps now she was allowed to play them from the top and made her contract.

Sinclair noted with great satisfaction that, had Minnie been allowed to draw trumps immediately, she would have gone down because of the 5–0 break in diamonds.

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