Morton's Fork by Foxymoron

Morton's Fork was named after John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VII in 1486 and Lord Chancellor in 1487. He argued that someone living modestly must be saving money, and therefore could afford to pay tax, whereas someone living extravagantly was obviously rich, and therefore could also afford to pay tax. In bridge it is used when a defender has a choice of two actions which fail in different ways.

Cardinal John Morton in a stained glass window

Shelley Shieff showed her understanding of the principle in the following hand, and your scribe and his partner were the victims.

The auction was Pass-Pass-1D-1NT-Pass-2C*-Pass-2S-Pass-4S-All Pass. 2C was Stayman and Andy Clery's raise to game showed justified confidence in his partner's card-play. 

South, Graham Horsecroft, led the queen of spades and East won, ruffed a diamond, and led the queen of clubs. North, Paul Lamford, ducked and declarer, Shelley Shieff, continued with a second club won by the ace, and now ruffed another diamond, ruffed a club, and ruffed a third diamond. Now she led the king of hearts from dummy and North was caught in Morton's Fork. If he won the ace, he was forced to lead a red suit, conceding the tenth trick. Instead he ducked, but Shelley played a club throwing a heart from East. South ruffed and played the jack of spades but East won and led the ace of diamonds. South could ruff, but now the seven of spades was declarer's tenth trick. Very nicely played.

And I nearly forgot about last week's poser. As a mathematical site shows, the chance of a host NOT getting a game at the Woodberry is the sum of the sequence 0, 2, 4, ... 2^n in a Poisson distribution. This works out to be

lambda is the average number of people who turn up without a partner, which my records show is about 1.2. This works out to be 54.5%. So the host is more likely to go home (or to the pub to watch Forest v Arsenal in my case).

I don't think I need to add to Andy Conway's analysis of the chance of there being a fifth Tuesday game.