Do you recall how Poco guaranteed us the heart 4-carder was NOT with west-- in time to work the double finesse on east?
I always work these through myself. I do the following:
A: Review the hands I played. Whether or not I scored well, I look for errors. This was a case, and not remotely the first case, where I got a good score but upon reflection see that I did not select the best line of play.
B: Then I look for what I might have done. I also look for what the defense might have done. Sometimes I see that I got a good score but if the defense had gone differently I might not have found the right line.
C: Then I see if anyone wants to give their thoughts. By this time it is too late to listen to the immediate post-mortem. On this one I found some bad choices early, but it took a while to clearly see the right line.
On a large percentage of the hands I can find my own error, often staring me in the face. One of those "Good grief, I should have seen that" things.
On this one, at T1 I won on the board with the Q. Not a good choice. I also noted that Rho played the T, which I thought was surprising. Apparently, they play, as many do, that the lead from a bunch of spots is second high. If so, why the T? But also, even if Rho didn't know the lead was second high, why the T? If he had options he could reason that if I held the 9 then playing the T under the Q doesn't help, and if his pard held the 9 then it is also pointless, So playing the T from length seemed an unlikely choice. That much occurred to me but I did not completely follow through.
I could have checked on that initial thought by playing the
A later on. That would show me Lho started with 8
s. So at crunch time, when I ask who might hold four hearts, I could place my bet on Rho since by then I would know that Lho started with 8 cards in the minors and Rho started with 5 cards in the minors. The odds work out to 14 to 1 in fact: There are exactly 9 ways to place all 4 hearts and 1 spade on my left, and there are (9 times 8 times 7 times 6 times 5 ) divided by (5 times 4 times 3 times 2 times 1) ways to place 5 of the 9 missing spades on my left. Doing the arithmetic we get 14 to 1. So clear enough. And you don't need the exact numbers to see it as clearly more likely that Rho holds 4 hearts.
But then, in my later thoughts, I went on to see how I could have been certain, and after some effort, I figured it out. I am open to hearing of other ways.
For me, this is the way to learn. Find my errors as best I can, analyze them as best I can, and then chat with others.
I will now give my own solution.
As noted, it starts by winning the first trick in hand with the A. Then the
K, noting the void on my left. Then the
back to the board, noting the initial
split.
Now I must pause for thought. I want to find out about hearts, but I don't want to destroy my entries. So:
T4 small
to my QT3, let's say Rho plays low and I take the T. Now I play 2 spades ending on the board.
The key, and it took me quite a while to realize this, is that just because clubs are ready to run it does not mean that I have to run them The club suit can serve as entries, and that means we can, before deciding on how to play hearts, cash both spades to learn the distribution.
Lho will follow to the first
, since he must have been dealt at least one spade. But he might or might not follow to the second spade.
Case 1: If he does not follow to the second spade then he has four hearts. The play is easy. Come to hand with the
K, lead a small !h to the AT5 and claim.
Case 2 (the actual case); He follows to the second spade. Then he does not have four hearts. How many? We neither know nor care. We leed the
A and if Lho follows suit then the hand is over. When he does not follow suit we lead the
T forcing a cover. We take it and we get back to the board in clubs to take another
finesse.
Of course this all took me much longer to think through than would be allowed at the table, no matter how generous others were with time. But the point is to see what could have been done, both because it is interesting and because it is good practice.
So what was the recommended line? I now think my line is unbeatable regardless of how the hearts lay, but it might well not be the only line. I regard the DARE hands as very useful.
