The Phantom Sacrifice

Deciding whether to take a save or defend on a board can be one of the more difficult decisions in bridge. For example, calculating whether your 3♠ contract vulnerable going 1 off is going to be better than their 3-level contract making requires good judgement. When it comes to the game zone and the decision to save involves bidding at the 5 or 6 level, this judgement requires even more skill.  After all, going three off not vulnerable is a great result if the opponents are making their vulnerable game, but only if that game makes. Otherwise, you have just ‘taken a phantom’ as they say. At matchpoints the decision making becomes even more critical as going for -200 against the opponents plus 140 gives you a big, fat zero, as opposed to minus a couple of imps at teams. I read somewhere that one of the top international pairs rarely choose to save as they believe their defence is so good that they don’t need to. I don’t know if this is true, but perhaps this is a philosophy that I might follow more, as my recent record in ‘saving’ at the 5-level has been terrible with most turning out to be the proverbial ‘phantoms’.

When you have had a run of ‘poor’ outcomes like I have, you have to determine if there is a cause, or if it is just a ‘run of bad luck’. I decided to go back to basics and review the factors I was using to make my ‘save’ decisions. When I did this, I found that on the ‘bad’ decisions I was neglecting to consider how many tricks my hand was likely to take and, based on the bidding, how many my partner might have. Placing too much emphasis on my own hand, rather than giving my partner a chance to decide. Losing confidence in your decision making can be deadly and can sometimes even have a flow-on effect to other parts of your game.

However, at times we are presented with a situation where a save seems like such good insurance that we would be kicking ourselves later if we didn’t make that choice.  These situations arise when we are green v red, partner hasn’t shown much and the bidding makes us think we have no chance to successfully defend the contract. This hand below is one of those times and my decision to save delivered a surprisingly good result for our side restoring some level of confidence in my judgement in this area.