The Cardturner (39 page)

Since he had no hearts, he had no heart losers. He could play a trump any time an opponent led a heart.

Even though he only had one club, he should have taken the club finesse. When it worked, he could then have discarded a diamond on the second club winner.

That would have left this diamond situation:

Alton now would have led the
3. West could have played his ace and won the trick, but that would have been Alton's last diamond loser.

In the end, he lost two spades and one diamond. Or, counting winners instead of losers, he won seven spade tricks, two club tricks, and one diamond trick.

". . . MUD from three small."

". . . upside-down count and attitude."

"She was squeezed in the black suits."

MUD
refers to a defender's choice of opening leads. There are
standard
opening leads from certain card-holdings. For example, if you have three cards in a suit, headed by an honor card, you would normally lead your lowest card. So from
K72, it is normal to lead the
2. If you have two small cards in a suit, you would lead the higher. So from
85, you would lead the
8. Where people tend to disagree is on what to lead from three small cards, say
852.
MUD
is one possibility. It's an acronym for Middle-Up-Down. If you agree to lead MUD, you would lead the middle card, the
5. Then the next time the suit was played you'd play "up," with the
8, and the third time "down," with the
2.

Personally, I don't like MUD, since the suit has to be played three times before I can figure out what's going on, which makes my partner's opening lead about as clear to me as the name implies.

Upside-down count and attitude
is the reverse of
standard
signals.

In standard signals, a high card encourages and a low card discourages. If you play "upside down," then a low card encourages. That refers to attitude.

Count signals
tell your partner how many cards you have in a suit. Playing standard signals, a low card says you have an odd number of cards. A high card shows an even number of cards. Your partner is expected to count the number of cards he has in that suit, and the number of cards the dummy has in that suit, and then figure out how many cards the declarer has in the suit.

If you play "upside down," then a low card shows an even number, and a high card shows odd.

Believe it or not, there are theoretical reasons why you would want to do this, and people have written entire books discussing the merits of different signaling methods.

"She was squeezed in the black suits"
does not refer to a woman trying to fit into a bikini that's too small for her. A squeeze occurs when a defender has to make a discard, but whatever card she chooses will give the declarer a trick. When you're in such a situation, having to make discard after discard, it feels like you're in an ever-tightening vise.

You can never be squeezed in just one suit. For a squeeze to work, one defender has to be put in the position of trying to protect two suits. The black suits are spades and clubs, of course.

25 percent slam:

Taking a finesse is like flipping a coin. It will work 50 percent of the time. The odds of a coin flip coming up heads are 50 percent. The odds of flipping a coin twice and getting heads both times are 25 percent.

Toni was right to feel fixed. The odds of two finesses succeeding are 25 percent.

Before you feel too bad for them, however, Toni and Alton were most likely lucky on other hands. In every session of bridge, you will get some lucky boards and some unlucky ones. Bridge players tend to dwell on their unfortunate results, especially when they occurred during the final round, after all the other results were already water under the bridge (pun intended).

Pages 267-268, computer hands:

The boards had been predealt. There were tiny bar codes on each card. A special card-dealing machine had dealt according to specific hand records.

You often hear bridge players complain about "computer hands," as if a computer designed them to be especially diabolical. That is a myth. Computer hands are just as random as human-dealt hands. The reason they are used is simply to make sure that the same hands are played in every section; and there's the added benefit of the players getting to see the hand records after the session is over.