BRIDGE

MONDAY, NOV. 28, 2022

There is no unanimity about who is the best player in the world, but there’s also no doubt that one of the leading candidates for this honour would be Bob Hamman. His long string of successes in national championships has been truly remarkable, and today’s hand from a tournament some years ago is a good indicator of how and why he has achieved that status.

Hamman was East and doubled five diamonds after the sequence shown. His partner, Bobby Wolff, led the spade seven, and declarer ruffed Hamman’s jack. South then played the ace and another club, trumping with dummy’s eight – whereupon Hamman discarded a heart!

You’d have to search far and wide to find anyone else who wouldn’t have overruffed at that point. But Hamman knew exactly what he was doing. Had he won the trick, declarer would have gone down only one – 200 points. South would have trumped the spade return, ruffed a club with the jack, drawn the remaining trumps with the A-K and then conceded a club trick to West’s king.

But Hamman realized that on the bidding South very likely had 0-1-5-7 distribution and that he could cause declarer a great deal of aggravation by not overruffing at trick three.

Declarer next led a heart from dummy. Hamman won with the king and returned a low spade. South ruffed, reducing his trump holding to the bare A-K-Q, and could do no better than ruff one of his remaining five clubs with dummy’s jack.

After that, the only tricks declarer could take were his A-K-Q of trump, so he wound up scoring only five trump tricks in his hand, two trump tricks in dummy and the ace of clubs.