Easter always zips by if you’re a bridge player and enter the EBU’s Easter Festival. There are four events to choose from and I chose them all. My favourite is the Swiss Teams and we normally do rather well. Not this year unfortunately. In the final match we played Simon Gillis’s team and I rather smugly thought we’d done well. Not so smug when we scored up. They murdered us. Simon was partnered by Norwegian world champion Erik Saelensminde – Silla to his friends – who defended this hand:

Erik was West and started with the ♠Jack. Simon gave count with the ♠7 and I won the King. With 14 points in his own hand and 6 in dummy, Silla knew his partner had nothing to help him and the situation looked pretty hopeless for the defence.

I cashed the ♦Ace and Silla ‘unblocked’ the King, trying to look like he’d started with Kx so I wouldn’t be able to establish the Diamonds without East getting in to shoot a Spade through. Unfortunately, I thought I didn’t need the Diamond suit to survive. I went to dummy with the ♦Q and played a Heart to my Jack. Erik won and exited a Club, won with the Ace and another Heart went to the 10 and West’s King. All sorted: four Clubs, two Hearts, two Diamonds and one Spade, but then Erik played the death card: the Jack of Diamonds – and I was squeezed!

In order to hold Qx in Spades I had to throw a Club or a Heart winner. West of course then exited with a plain card and waited for his two Spade tricks.

One down on a hand where 99.9 per cent of us would make five and not even remember the hand two seconds later!