One More Difference

"I'll try not to aggravate you," I promised Dave.  He's an A player and this was our first time playing together.

"I don't get aggravated," he solemnly assured me.

"That's good," I replied.  We'll see, I thought. I can be pretty aggravating.

Thus started our partnership.  I proceeded to do some good things and some not so good things; Dave did some very good things.  One of the not so good things I did was defensive.  I was on lead and my partner had bid hearts.  I hadn't supported his bid since I only had 5 points, but I did have two hearts.  I led one.  Dummy came down and I calculated that declarer only had one heart, so when I got in again I led a different suit.

That may not sound particularly interesting to you, but I was a bit proud of myself.  It's not easy for me to keep the bidding in mind once play begins and to put that information together with the cards in play to figure out who has what.  In fact, I recalculated several times wondering if I should again lead a heart, but every way I looked at it the declarer had to be out.  I thought about leading a heart anyway to draw his trump, but in this case that didn't seem like an especially fruitful idea.  Even so, I had an uneasy feeling about the whole thing.

At the end of the hand I was relieved to see that declarer did, in fact, have no hearts left in his hand.  My partner was not as relieved.

"Do you still have hearts?" he asked me.

"Yes, one," I said and showed him.

"Why didn't you lead it?"

"Declarer was out, he would have ruffed," I said with confidence born of confirmation.

"You still should have led it."

"Even though declarer would have ruffed it?" I asked, bewildered.

"Yes.  Since you didn't support my hearts and didn't lead a heart a second time, I thought you were out and declarer had hearts.  I would have kept my clubs and thrown off the hearts if I had known declarer was out."

Wow, what a great lesson to learn.  It seemed obvious once Dave explained it, but I hadn't thought about it that way.  This was one more example of a difference between the thinking of an A player and a C player (but no longer this C player).

And as you would expect, Dave stayed calm and unaggravated throughout.