C R Y D E R P O I N T 16 JUNE Contract Bridge LARCENY at the Crossroads by STEVE BECKER Many contracts fail because of unlucky distribution, but some of them can be salvaged despite a bad break. Take this case where you’re in six diamonds and West leads a heart. You win with the ace, expecting to make all the tricks, but when you play the A-K of trumps, West shows out, and you realize that even the small slam is now in danger. All is not yet lost, however, since East might have to follow suit when you next play the K-Q-10 of spades. If he does, you can discard a heart on the fourth round of spades and so make the slam. Unfortunately, East ruffs the third spade and cashes a heart, and down you go. This is certainly an unlucky result, since the trumps could have been divided 3-2, or East might have had the simple decency to hold three or more spades. Nevertheless, the fact is that the contract might have come home with a slight variation in the play. MY BAD!!! 16 CRYDER POINT COURIER | JUNE 2015 | WWW.QUEENSCOURIER.COM After the 4-1 division is revealed, the best approach is to cash the king of spades and then lead the ten to the ace. When you next continue with the nine, it becomes far from easy for East to ruff, as he might think West has the queen. East might well decide to discard a club on the spade lead from dummy, thinking you might have started with something like: S K10 H 103 D AKQ542 C Q97 In that case, he would hand you the slam by ruffing the nine but would defeat you by discarding on it. If he does discard, you can then make the slam after scoring the queen of spades by crossing to dummy with a club and discarding a heart on the jack of spades. Your conscience might bother you for having stolen a slam you were not entitled to make, but the 1,390 points you enter in your column should dispel those feelings very quickly. (c) 2015 King Features Syndicate Inc. CARD-READING BY ELAINE SANDBERG Playing tournament Mah Jongg is much different than what I’ll call “social” Mah Jongg. Mostly, the rules are very restrictive. Each tournament makes its own rules, and time limits on games make it very fast—15 minutes are allowed for each game and each table plays four games— that’s 1 hour per round. Each participant is gi ven a direction—North, South, East and West and a number. So you wear a tag that reads, for example, 45 W. This means you are identified as player #45 and you sit at the table in the West position for the purpose of scoring. The person with the highest score wins. There are many more differences, but this post is not really about the tournament. It’s about something that happened. Here is the story. The game had started and player sitting West called an 8 Bam, but without taking the called tile, placed one 8 Bam and a Joker on her rack. She looked at her partial Exposure and said, “Oops, I don’t want it” meaning the 8Bam on the table. Another player immediately called her hand dead. “But “I said, “She didn’t take the tile from the table. Her hand is dead only if she puts the called tile up on her rack.” There followed a heated discussion about the status of the hand. Finally, my argument prevailed and the player returned her partial Exposure to her hand and the game continued. But I was disturbed by the certainty the other player displayed about the call. So, the next day I called the League’s office and after I explained the situation, was told, “Yes the hand is dead. Once a player displays any part of an Exposure, she cannot put her tiles back, no matter what. Once she said “I don’t want it”, her hand was dead. So having learned something, I wished I could have apologized for my mistake to the payer who was correct. Maybe she reads my blog... Reprinted courtesy of the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles and Elaine Sandberg. Elaine is a mah-jongg instructor, who has taught the game for Holland American Cruise Lines and at American Jewish University, and the author of “A Beginner’s Guide to American Mah Jongg: How to Play the Game and Win” (Tuttle, $14.95). AMERICAN til next time... may the tiles be with you!
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