By Brian Senior (slightly edited here). Original source: World Bridge Series Championship, Daily Bulletin, October 2010
All Bulletin personnel should go to dinner with different players every evening. You may sit and watch at a table for two hours and never see anything newsworthy — but how often do you go through a whole dinner conversation with a group of bridge players and have the same problem?
Sure enough, Saturday evening saw me at dinner in a group including the Anglo-American partnership of James Mates and Marshall Lewis. During their excellent second session in the Open Pairs qualifier, Marshall played this deal in 3NT after opening 2NT.
E led a low spade to dummy’s nine, and Marshall started clubs by leading dummy’s queen. West could see that covering now would make life very easy for declarer, who would win the ace and lead a second round to knock out the jack — so he tried the effect of ducking instead. Not a good idea (though to be fair, he may already have been headed for a poor score, due to declarer’s happy inspiration regarding management of the clubs).
Marshall now crossed to the club ace and played the king of spades. This was the last chance for E to take his ace, so he did, and returned a heart. Marshall could have ensured three heart tricks without loss by playing low from dummy, but he judged E would never have led the suit in this position if holding the queen, and accordingly rose with dummy’s king.
A diamond to the king allowed Marshall to cash the queen of spades, pitching a club from dummy. Now three more rounds of diamonds squeezed West out of his fourth heart, because he had to keep the club guard. Marshall next took the heart finesse, and now the queen fell under the ace to yield twelve tricks and a huge +490.
