Rare but Worth Noting


A J 4
K J 8 5
Q 10
A K Q 8
6 3 Q 10 9 8 7
6 4 3 A 2
J 7 5 4 3 2 K 9 8 6
7 2 6 3
K 5 2
Q 10 9 7Contract: 6 clubs, 6 hearts
A Opening lead: 4 of diamonds
J 10 9 5 4

I was looking for a "Major over a Minor" hand to supplant one I'd just deleted as unsatisfactory, when I came across this one, which has a lesson on going for the balanced suit as trump, as well as the Major over the Minor. One could have sympathy if the two principles were in conflict. But when both point to the major? Six hearts makes with no difficulty. Then I noticed that two declarers were going down in 6 clubs. Why should they have any trouble with that healthy club suit? I wondered with a hasty look. And then I took a second look at the hand and saw why.
This is a classic hand, commonly given in bridge books, where the 4-4 suit works better as trump than the 5-4 suit because you get a sluff on the 5-4 suit if it's a side suit. You'll note that you've gotta have a lot of things go right for this to be the case. The 4-4 trump suit has to split 3-2 and there must be a guarded loser in another suit such that sluffing it brings in a trick you wouldn't have without that sluff.
Here if hearts split 4-1, there's no advantage, as just mentioned. If the Q of spades were onsides, there would be no advantage. You could make slam in either suit. If by chance dummy had a singleton diamond and four spades, there would be no advantage, for you then could only sluff that fourth spade you could ruff anyway. But they all came together here to make the 4-4 suit a viable suit for slam while the 5-4 suit doesn't work as trump. Not for a slam, anyway.
Now the reader might wonder, how do you know when you do have that situation? There are, to be sure, a few bidding sequences where one can have a pretty good idea. Two diamonds, Flannery, fr'instance, traditionally promises 4 spades and 5 hearts, and a responder with 4 spades and 3 hearts would know to pick the balanced fit. Similarly, if a partner opens a spade and rebids 2 hearts, he may or may not have 5 hearts, but you know him to hold 5 spades (by traditional bidding today) with at least 4 hearts, so with 3 spades and 4 hearts the responder would do well to support the latter. But I would suggest that this is such a rarity where everything clicks that it's not worth concerning youself with.
Rather, I would say that there's something bigger at issue here, and that is that the bidders should have been smoking out and settling in the 4-4 major, period. Because majors will bring you more points than minors, by chance declarers would have settled in the suit that works best because it is balanced -- and most declarers did. I have the bidding schemes for each of the downed declarers in 6 clubs, and not one of the four bidders (two pairs) mentioned hearts! At all. Furthermore, in each case there was an easy road to the heart fit. For North in each case opened two no trump, each responder bid 3 clubs (Stayman), and opener rebid 3 diamonds! One 3 diamond bid was alerted, for whatever that meant, and the other was not. But they both seem to be denying a 4-card major!
Well, supposing we reverse the balance: we have 4-4 clubs and 5-4 hearts. Particularly given short-club openings, how are we going to smoke that out? First of all, I've always recommended a major over a minor when you've got a fit in each, yes, particularly at the game level, where 4 spades will bring more points than 5 clubs. At slam level, where you're looking for the same number of tricks in either denomination, I would be sorely tempted to choose a balanced minor over an unbalanced major. However, this is not only getting into pretty delicate bidding we're not likely to find below expert level -- bear in mind cue bids, short minor openings and maybe a Gerber 4 club bid thrown in, all leaving a lot of room for misinterpretation about whether there's a balanced minor or not -- but we must remember that there's no certainty of an extra trick with the balanced suit as trump. I did say "tempted", not "would choose". So we're only talking about a slam bid with a balanced minor and (slightly) unbalanced major where there is a guarded loser to be sluffed on the latter suit. If you look at every hand on every tournament of OKBridge, I would say that you're not likely to find more than one hand a year fitting all those criteria. In the meantime, going for the major over the minor when you have two viable trump suits, would do you well often enough to compensate for that rare, rare hand where 4-4 clubs would do you better in a slam than 5-4 in a major.
In short, I would not be ashamed to be in a 5-4 major when later analysis showed that a 4-4 minor would have brought slam. You can't worry yourself over these improbabilities.

I have often inveighed against novices overloading their bidding with a lot of conventions until they get real, real good. But at the same time, I always point out that I consider Blackwood and Stayman indispensible to be taught along with a student's early exposure to a bidding system. Three clubs opposite an opening 2 no has to be Stayman. Indeed, the Stayman Convention was devised for exactly this type of hand! So that slam should not have been missed.
About a day after penning the thought that it's often difficult to smoke out a 4-4 minor, what with short minor openings and Gerber, I came across a cold 7 no hand which just about everyone was reaching. But down at the bottom of the listing were three pairs in 5 clubs! How did that happen?
In two cases, one partner, the bigger hand, leaped to 4 clubs (Gerber, bidding over a no trump), got the correct response of 4 hearts for one ace, went to 5 clubs, asking for kings -- and was dropped! The third pair found a different path to settling in 5 clubs, but I don't have a full remembrance of the bidding. I do remember that they had about 8 bids, the first four alerted, to find their miserable contract.