Two very exciting tournaments drew to a close last week. The first was the Spingold, the main teams event in the Las Vegas Summer National, the final of which saw two top Norwegian pairs opposing each other. In the end the slight underdogs, Richard Schwartz’s team, prevailed over mighty Monaco.

Closer to home, there’s no stopping English bridge at the moment. After our fine results in the European Championships, the Chairman’s Cup, Sweden’s flagship teams tournament, was won by three Englishmen and a Welshman — David Kendrick,  Michael Byrne, Mike Bell and Paul Lamford. Brilliant boys. Well done.

Here is David, showing his eye for the game:

David was South, and received the lead of the ♠3 to the Jack and King.

There may be many ways of making this hand if you know where the missing honours are, but David’s way was very pretty, and well worth a look. He overtook the ♦Queen with dummy’s Ace and played the Jack of diamonds — discarding the Queen of spades from hand!

West looked confused, but took the trick and cashed the Ace of spades. Now what? As dummy has a string of winners, spades and diamonds are out of the question. West tried the ♣10, taken by South with the Jack. Declarer now continued his fine work by cashing another top club, and then led the ♥10 out of hand. West won but was endplayed yet again. He could either play a heart into declarer’s hand or give dummy the rest of the tricks. In other words poor West had the miserable choice of conceding nine tricks or ten! Nice work David.