Two of the fundamental aspects of good bridge are good bidding — so that you get into all your best contracts, stay out of bad ones, prevent opponents from reaching their best contracts and penalise them when they reach bad ones — and good defence — so that your opponents have to work hard for their contracts and you don't give them any help. The following hand shows how not to bid and, most glaringly, how not to defend.

You pick up the following hand second in at favourable vulnerability:

Not the greatest hand in the world but when RHO opens 1 as dealer it's a very respectable 1 overcall. LHO now bids 1 and partner pre-empts 3. This ends the auction and you are quite happy to play there with a singleton in one of their suits and partner hopefully having a well-placed honour or two in spades.

The opening lead is a club and dummy comes down:

E/W Vuln Dealer E	K J 7 3 Q 7 6 5 10 7 10 8 2			West North East South Partner Paul 1 1 1 3 AP
	10 8 6 5 K J 10 9 3 K 9 5 J

Now this contract has a few minor flaws. Four are easy to discern — the four aces. With a spade bid on your left and the ace missing you are also likely to lose at least one spade ruff, particularly as you have to lose the lead in trumps before drawing them all. You could quite easily lose a second spade trick even if the opponents can't engineer a ruff and you might additionally lose two diamond tricks depending on the location of the A.

However, given the spade position (4-1 or 5-0 split), oppo's lack of many hearts apart from the ace and the solid nine card club fit the other way (plus our lack of aces) it does look like they can make at least 5. So even 1 down for -50 is going to be a good score for us.

I play low from dummy on the small club lead and RHO pauses before inserting the 9. Maintaining a straight face despite having just made a trick with my singleton jack I play the J followed by the 9, ducked twice by RHO (who is left with the bare ace of trumps) and LHO shows out. I now leave the A out and play a spade towards dummy, wondering which card I'm going to guess to put in from dummy. The guess does not arise however as the ace goes in from LHO and the 4 (which must be a singleton on the bidding) falls from RHO. Now with Q92 left I have an easy double finesse against LHO to bring in the rest of the spade suit, and when the A is onside as well I bring home 3+1 despite missing all the aces and with no void to compensate! You may be surprised to find that this was the full deal:

Now 6 looks a good spot for oppo to be in — ruffing two hearts in dummy does the trick — but it does only make because the hands fit together very well. However at least 5 shouldn't be too hard to reach! I find nothing wrong in RHO's 1 opening, LHO's 1 bid over my 1 overcall and RHO's pass over the 3 raise (currently misfitting with partner's spades). What I am less impressed with though is LHO's decision to pass the 3 bid holding 12 points including a singleton in our suit and as yet undisclosed AQxx support for his partner's suit. This was then compounded by the stunning lead of low from the aforementioned AQxx on which RHO made the "expert" play of finessing the 9 because partner couldn't possibly have led from AQxx (if you're going to lead that suit lead the ace!). But if partner has led from the queen (as looks more likely than a singleton) then surely playing the king is a sensible play anyway?

I humbly submit that this hand deserves to be recorded as poor bridge! [It sure does! —Ed]