[Coelacanth]

This is the last board of a Swiss match; the preceding boards have seemed quite flat.

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You may or may not approve of the bidding. South's leap to game is predicated on the fact that North (me) is known to be a fairly solid bidder. In first seat vul, South is entitled to expect a "real" hand; the actual hand is about the worst he could expect to catch.

East leads the ♥Q. Plan the play.

If you win in hand and finesse a club,

Spoiler

the finesse wins as both opponents follow low. If you then cash the ♣A, East drops the King.

If you win in dummy and lead a trump,

Spoiler

your experienced RHO follows low. If you insert the 9 or 10, LHO wins the Jack. If you play the Queen, LHO plays the Jack.

Now what?

[mikeh]

I'm not going to post my thoughts on the play: I want to give B/I posters a chance to comment. My post is just a gentle suggestion: it is conventional to post hands so that S is declarer. For me, having N as declarer causes me to feel disoriented, and when as you do in the spoilers, you refer to LHO, I have to consciously work out that LHO is on the right of the screen. LHO's belong on the left

[MrAce]

Deleted , nonsense.

[Antrax]

Somehow all the lines seem equal to me. If I can play trumps for two losers, then I can afford to lose the heart and make. If I lose three trumps, there won't be enough time to discard the heart loser, unless I want to choose an early club finesse, which doesn't seem like the best idea (if given enough time, I'd try to ruff out the king). To play trumps for only two losers, I need spades to split 3-3 or the jack being a doubleton and I have to guess the jack anyway.
Is there a strictly better line?

[Coelacanth]

mikeh, on 2011-November-07, 17:03, said:

I'm not going to post my thoughts on the play: I want to give B/I posters a chance to comment. My post is just a gentle suggestion: it is conventional to post hands so that S is declarer. For me, having N as declarer causes me to feel disoriented, and when as you do in the spoilers, you refer to LHO, I have to consciously work out that LHO is on the right of the screen. LHO's belong on the left

Fair point.

I posted it "upside down" because I was North on the actual hand, and was afraid I'd reverse East and West if I made South the declarer. So to avoid confusing myself, I confused everyone else. Sorry about that.

[mikeh]

Ok, not much action here, so I'll give you my thoughts. I actually think this is a tough B/I hand.

There is no rush to hook the club....yes, taking a losing hook right away will often save one trick compared to playing on trump first, but we should be worrying about making, not about going one or two down.

So I win the heart in dummy and play a spade.

The spade suit is complex. Within the suit itself, ignoring elopement and coup issues, our only hopes are:

J8 onside doubleton, or

AKx onside and the defence errs by playing low. Of course, if we held QJ9xxx and they rose with the K, that would be an error as well So RHO has a guess and I suspect that most would make the smooth duck.

However, we have elopement and coup positions to consider as well. Thus, if we play low to the 10, and lose to the J, we might try to elope with small trumps and create an end position.


And if we play low to the Q and the J appears (which is very low probability unless one reads the spoilers), we can hope to elope with our small trump and win 10 tricks.

At the table, if the 8 appeared on my right, with no apparent thought, I'd probably play the 10 as my best hope to lose only 2 trump tricks. If it lost to the K, I'd probably win the heart return and hook the club, pitch the heart, cross in diamonds and lay down the spade Q.

if it lost to the A, I'd play rho to have KJ8 and play on elopement lines.


Notice that my line varies according to the cards the opps play. LHO can play either the A or the K from AKxx, but most defenders win the K. This is similar to the point that RHO can play the K (or the A) from AKx, but most play low in this position (properly so on different layouts of the spade suit).

If RHO played lower than the 8, I'd play the Q. Given the spoiler (the J appears), I'd play for spades to be 5-1 and would hook the club, take a pitch, ruff a heart, play 2 diamonds ending in dummy and ruff a club (if possible) and exit a diamond....rho has to ruff this and I hold 1096 behind his AK8 in trump....with 2 clubs, 2 diamonds, 2 hearts, the spade Q and two ruffs already...I am assured of 10 tricks.

[Coelacanth]

mikeh, on 2011-November-08, 11:01, said:

If RHO played lower than the 8, I'd play the Q. Given the spoiler (the J appears), I'd play for spades to be 5-1 and would hook the club, take a pitch, ruff a heart, play 2 diamonds ending in dummy and ruff a club (if possible) and exit a diamond....rho has to ruff this and I hold 1096 behind his AK8 in trump....with 2 clubs, 2 diamonds, 2 hearts, the spade Q and two ruffs already...I am assured of 10 tricks.

We have a winner. Suffice it to say that I did not find this line at the table.

On reflection, there are a couple of things that I failed to consider at the table that I probably should have:

1) Upon seeing dummy, it seems likely that at the other table the contract will be 3NT by S. On a heart lead, this contract is doomed to fail, but on the more likely minor-suit lead it looks likely to make. (As it happens, this was the contract at the other table, and it made 4 on a club lead.) Thus, while my contract looks safe-ish, with only 3 sure losers (with the chance of pitching the heart on a club), I need to think long and hard about any adverse distributions that might set me.

2) In particular, I need to consider the trump suit. I want to play trumps before clubs; if I have 3 trump losers I need to finesse the club or hope for a discard on the 13th diamond. I'm not an expert on suit combinations, but leading low to the queen loses to stiff ace or king offside and low to the 10 loses to the stiff jack. However, I wasn't really thinking about 5-1 breaks; I was just trying for an extra trick if the jack happened to be onside. Perhaps if I had given this more thought I would have come up with the right answer.

Full credit to my RHO for passing in tempo over 4♠ holding ♠AK8xx, and for playing low smoothly when I led the spade at trick 2.

Unfortunately, apart from the spade break everything on the hand is friendly. The diamonds are 3-3, the club KJ are in front of the AQ, and the hand with ♠AKxxx has only one heart to play when she wins her spade tricks. So my counterpart at the other table had no trouble making 3NT while I went down in 4♠, which I think is cold double-dummy despite the 5-1 break.

Live and learn.