In Sunday's Daily News, we saw a few boards featuring Bermuda's Vera Petty and Roman Smolski. Over the course of those boards, they were pretty uninspired, and would like to offer this exhibit from the second qualifying session of the J.M.Weston Mixed Pairs to show that things did get better.

Session 2. Board 16. Dealer West. EW Game ª K 9 2 © K 6 3 2 ¨ J 6 § 10 5 4 3 ª Q J 3 ª A 10 8 5 4 © A 10 7 4 © Q 9 8 ¨ 8 7 4 3 ¨ Q 10 9 § J 7 § K 8 ª 7 6 © J 5 ¨ A K 5 2 § A Q 9 6 2 West North East South Smolski Petty Pass Pass 1ª 2§ 2ª 3§ All Pass

Smolski kicked off with the queen of spades to the king and ace and petty returned a spade. Smolski won the jack and switched to a low heart. Not altogether surprisingly, declarer misguessed by playing low. Petty won the queen and played a third spade for declarer to ruff. Now declarer played three rounds of diamonds, ruffing in dummy, followed by a club to the queen. On this trick, Smloski dropped the jack! Declarer fell for the falsecard. She assumed that the two remaining clubs were on her right so, rather than lay down the §A, played a heart. Smolski won the ©A and played his fourth diamond, allowing Petty to over-ruff dummy for one down and an excellent matchpoint score as most North/Souths were making ten tricks in a club contract.

While one must applaud East/West for their defence, and in particular Smolski for dropping the §J, declarer should surely not have been taken in by it. If East really held three clubs, it was quite unlikely that she would also have sufficient length in the red suits to allow declarer an entry to dummy to take the club finesse, even though the 1ª opening could have been on four cards.