North-South arrived at an excellent seven heart contract and West opened the jack of clubs. Place yourself in the South seat and develop a plan of attack that will yield thirteen tricks.
The natural instinct is to try to trump diamonds in the dummy and make long tricks in the closed hand. In this case, you will not be successful. No matter how hard you try, you will always be one trick short.
This is a hand where you have to look a little deeper into the possibilities. The successful line of play is to win the king of clubs and immediately trump a small spade. Cash the ace of hearts. A small heart to the queen tells you that hearts break well and allows you to lead another small spade. You trump with your remaining high heart in hand.
When both opponents follow to the second spade you can claim. A heart back to dummy extracts the last outstanding trump and the ace-king of spades clear that suit. In all, you score five spade tricks, five heart tricks, a diamond, and two clubs.
There is a boom in bridge software. The availability of the personal computer has caused an explosion in the brdige marketplace. There are numerous locations on the Internet to play bridge and there are so many bridge playing programs available that the average bridge player who is looking for the "right" program could be overwhelmed.
The American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) has been conducting an ongoing review of bridge software since 1993 and it publishes an annual report of that review in it's monthly publication, The Bridge Bulletin. The 1999 review (November) listed most of the available programs and provided a great deal of detail. I am listing the top five programs here, in the order that they were ranked in the ACBL review.
1. GIB (Ginsberg's Intelligent Bridge Player) ($79.95) from
Just Right, Inc. 29585 Fox Hollow Rd., Eugene, OR 97405. The
internet site is http:www.gibware.com and the email address is
2. Bridge Baron 9.01 ($59.95) from Great Game Products,
Inc., Bethesda MD. The toll free number is 1-800-426-3758. The
internet site is http://www.bridgebaron.com and the email address
is
3. Q-Plus Bridge 5.5 ($60) from Q-Plus Software, Munich,
Germany. The internet site is http:www.q-plus.com and the email
address is
4. Micro Bridge 8.06 ($70) from Tomio Uchida, Asaka City,
Saitama, Japan. The internet address is
http://www.threeweb.ad.jp/~mcbridge and the email address is
5. Bridge Buff 7.0 ($99.95) from BridgeWare, Toronto, ON,
Canada. The internet site is http://www.bridgebuff.com and the
email address is
These programs will all give you the capability to bid and play a hand that is entered or dealt by the program. Some of them will solve "double-dummy" problems. Most of them are flexible with regard to bidding systems, but you may have to do a little research to determine if your favorite systems are supported.
Before making a purchase decision, contact the vendor and
determine whether the program will operate correctly on your
computer. With so many different systems (hardware and software)
currently being used, it is very important that you ask this
question first. Keep in mind that computer equipment quickly
becomes out dated. If you purchased your computer more than a
year or two ago, you run the risk of not having sufficient
processing speed to run a "more sophisticated" program. Bridge
programs use a sampling method for decision making and an older
machine may take so long to go through this process that it will
not be fun to play. A 200 MZh Pentium processor is probably the
minimum requirement for most of the listed programs, with a
faster machine being preferable.
----