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Sharif Talks Bridge Finesse £12.20 inc p&p from the Mr
Bridge Mail Order Service Not so very long ago, if you had posed the question: 'Who is the most famous bridge player in the world?' you would have been fairly confident of getting the reply: 'Omar Sharif'. Even now that he has retired from the game, his name remains well known. As you can deduce from the title, the book is all about bridge rather than movies, pretty girls and exotic locations, though some of the latter creep into the bridge stories. Even if you are in the 0.01% of players who have never heard of Omar Sharif, you will still find plenty in the book to entertain. There are hands a-plenty and a good smattering of interesting tales either when these support the bridge or where there was simply a space to fill! The authors (let us not forget the role of our own David Bird in this venture - I suspect that he drafted most if not all of the manuscript and undertook the lion's share of the extensive research) mention the role of luck in a number of places. Luck is one of the game's beauties, enabling a relatively inexperienced player to do well against a world champion, but also one of its bugbears if you and your partner reach the correct contract only to find that a hostile division of the opposing cards means it goes down. The auction on this deal was surprisingly brief. Sharif, West, passed,
Claude Delmouly, North, opened 1
How would you play this contract when West leads the A successful club finesse would give you twelve tricks but, unless East has no more than three clubs, there would be little hope of a thirteenth. The lead suggests that West has the diamonds covered, so you cannot develop a squeeze. Not looking very happy, declarer won the diamond lead in his hand and
played four rounds of spades, throwing a club. He continued with the three
top hearts and played another diamond. Both defenders had followed to
three rounds of each major, but East showed out on the second round of
diamonds. This gave declarer a fairly precise count on the hand. Sharif's
shape was either 3-3-5-2 or 3-4-5-1. In neither case would a finesse against
the Sharif gave a resigned smile when declarer spread his remaining cards to claim the grand and thought to himself: 'If he insisted on being so lucky, why not choose a moment when I was his partner?' Julian Pottage |
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© Bridge Plus 1999-2006
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and East passed. South, Leon Yallouze, jumped to 7NT!
Q J 10 9
K Q J
2
