Help
Playing in an international Seniors team event, with an expert partner, you find yourself in a seemingly mundane partial.
The opening lead is the heart A, the opps playing A from AK. RHO plays a middle spot…they play udca and this seems to be a count situation.
That isn’t great news because LHO may work out that his partner has 3 hearts, and since we can be sure that the spade ace is offside, we don’t want a shift to that suit. Fortunately, perhaps because the spot isn’t clearly readable or he’s hoping you hold 3…he continues the King as RHO completes his echo and you ruff.
Ok…we need to tackle trump. The spade suit can wait.
With a 9 card fit the slightly best percentage play, in a vacuum, is to play for the drop. But we’re not in a vacuum….LHO has told us that he has 7 hearts to his partner’s 3. While that doesn’t rule out west holding Qx(x), it does shift the odds to finesse east.
So low to the King and lead the 8….both follow to the first round and east plays the 7 on the second.
Going with the percentages, you let it ride and your first hurdle is overcome as west pitches a heart.
What now? We have lost a heart and our prospects in spades aren’t great….but we still don’t need to attack the suit yet.
Entries are a little tight, and while a small spade away from dummy may give RHO a problem, it really shouldn’t plus it could be the only way to lose three tricks in the suit. There’s no hurry to pull that last trump…if you do, then you’re either leading spades now or a club to dummy after which you’ll eventually have to lead a low spade from dummy.
It can’t hurt to cash a club. Both follow, west with the lowest outstanding. While good players tend to avoid giving honest count more than do most non-experts, we tend to trust this play…west knows very little about the hand and doesn’t know what info might be useful to partner, so he’s likely to be giving honest count, to help partner.
You cash a second club on which RHO plays the Jack. This is good news in that our 10 is going to be high, but we’re still in dummy.
Playing a third club is right if East follows but while he can throw the Jack from Jxx without cost, we decide to take him at face value…clubs are 4=2. If so, then we’ve stripped east of clubs and it would be a mistake to play a third round…he ruffs and while he now must give us a ruff and sluff or let our spade King score (he’ll be down to nothing but majors), we’re down…one heart, one ruff and eventually two spades.
Which, btw, is why good players routinely falsecard when it can’t hurt partner….if he had three clubs, rather than two, we need to cash the third round now!
Having trusted him, we draw the last trump, ending in hand when east plays his now singleton Queen.
We are reduced to K8xx void J Q in dummy and 107x void 10 109 in hand. The spade ace is known to be offside (nobody opens 3H in first chair with AKxxxxx (or better) and the spade Ace)
We want to lead a spade, planning to duck such that east wins….he then has to play a major…a heart lets us pitch a spade from hand and a spade lets us score the king.
If he had a third club, he’d be able to exit that club…there was a lot depending on how we viewed the club split.
If clubs are 4=2, the spades are 1=5.
If we lead low and west plays the 9, we’re down. Covering lets east cash three spade tricks, and ducking lets west exit a club, endplaying dummy.
We can cater to that by leading the 10…..
But what if he has a stiff Queen or jack? Now the ten is fatal…he covers perforce and we lose three spades right now if we cover and slowly if we duck.
What are the odds? In that vacuum we spoke of earlier, a stiff honour is twice as likely as a stiff 9.
Plus he’d be more likely to switch at trick two with a stiff 9 than with either honour…this definitely doesn’t count as a strong inference.
So the best play is a low spade. If an honour appears, cover and later, if needed, lead low from dummy towards your 10x, knowing the your 10 will take a trick.
As it happens, low fetches low from west…east had no escape with AQJ9x and Jx in clubs.
Obviously the defence could have done better….a spade switch at trick two would have scuppered the contract no matter what. But west had a guess. If his partner held a stiff heart (and the carding suggested either east or I did), then he has to continue hearts…not only might he promote a trump for partner but also he may never score his second heart trick if he doesn’t take it.
