You are South, NS Game, and Partner and you have rocketed to a small slam in Spades after your 1NT Opening with no opposition bidding:
North KJ864
Q43
84
AKQ
South A102
AK7
K109
J762
West kindly leads the Ace of Diamonds and continues with another Diamond to East's Jack and your King. How do you plan your play?
.
.
.
12 tricks clearly presents no problem as long as you can "find" the Queen of Spades. You can finesse for the Queen against either opponent, but which way should you take?
There are no clues from the bidding and no reason to place the Queen with one opponent or the other so it seems like a 50/50 choice. There is, however, one very good reason why you should finesse against
West for the Queen: Suppose one opponent or the other holds
Q9xx. If East has that holding, you cannot possible draw trumps for no losers. You can only finesse
once against East. You
can, however, catch Q9xx in the West hand: Cash the Ace and run the
10. If West covers with the Queen and East shows out, you can return to hand with a Heart and finesse again against the 9.
In practice, Partner and I were in 4 rather than 6 and the Spades were not 4-1, but that doesn't detract from the fact that you should be finessing against West here. It's just good practice even if there is only a second overtrick at stake.There are lots of variations on this theme and positions where an apparent choice is actually no choice: (Obviously this is assuming that there are no clues from the bidding or early play about how to take the finesse. Sometimes there
are clues which might override these considerations)
For example:
(1)
A8xxx opposite KQ9xYou can only catch J10xx in one hand if it's lying
under the KQ9x so you should always cash the Ace first
(2)
A109x opposite K7xxIf the hand sitting
over the A109x has QJ8x you are doomed to lose 2 trump tricks, but if that holding is sitting
under the A109x, then you can escape for one loser, so you should cash the King first.