When you play in a doubled contract, you sometimes have to decide how far to go to try to make your bid, and how far to go to try to minimize your loss.

Here is a sad case where the declarer, in a reckless display of total obliviousness, lost control of the hand and took a bad beating as a result.

West made a takeout double of the opening diamond bid, and East elected to leave the double in. West led the king of hearts and shifted to the jack of diamonds.

Declarer covered the jack with dummy’s queen and took East’s king with the ace. South promptly returned a diamond, hoping to get the adverse trumps out of the way so he could cash his spade tricks.

The idea of drawing trump was greeted with enthusiastic approval by East, who proceeded to extract them all. West, in the meantime, discarded three spades and a heart.

East then made the fine play of shifting to the queen of clubs, trapping South’s king. The defenders thereupon collected four clubs and three hearts to bring about a six-trick defeat, which came to a tidy 1700 points.

Of course, penalties of this magnitude are almost always traceable to malfeasance in office, and this hand is no exception. Aside from the fact that a spade contract by North-South would have been far superior, the matter of declarer’s line of play at one diamond doubled left a great deal to be desired.

The fact that East had left the double in made it a virtual certainty that he had started with five trumps. Warned by the bidding what to expect, South should have tried to minimize the damage.

After winning the ace of diamonds, he should have started cashing his spades instead of leading a trump. By playing this way, he could have assured scoring five tricks to hold himself to a modest set. As it was, though, all he scored was the ace of trump.

Tomorrow >> Famous Hand.

— Steve Becker