Igo on sometimes about the need to have a
plan for each hand. Plans aren't always set in concrete, however, and it's best to keep them flexible. This hand I played with Eszter yesterday is a case in point.
Game All, Dealer WestYou are South and hold
South K7
1092
J95
KJ983
BiddingWest North East South1
2
(1) No 2
No 3
No 4
(1) Majors, weak or strong
As an aside, if you don't already, best to use 2-suited overcalls as weak or strong, but never intermediate. If you use Michaels etc with intermediate hands as well as weak or strong hands, Partner never knows whether to invite when they are intermediate themselvesWest led the Ace of Diamonds, and this is what I could see
North (Dummy) AQ854
AJ875
6
A5
South K7
1092
J95
KJ983
West won the opening lead and continued with the King of Diamonds, ruffed in Dummy. What's our plan? Clearly if the Spades are 3-3 or one of the Heart honours are onside, I can take 2 finesses in Hearts, losing only 1
, 1
and maybe 1
. That's a decent enough plan for the time being: West opened the bidding, so there's a decent chance they'll have one of the Heart honours.
On the other hand, if the Spades are 4-2 and
both of the Heart honours are offside, that plan could run into trouble, especially if East started with
KQx, because when I take the second Heart finesse, East will be able to play a 3rd Heart and now I'll have to concede a Spade trick as well.
See what happens, though: At trick 3 I crossed back to hand with the Spade King and ran the 10
, losing to East's King. East switched to a small Club. What now?
Well if I was going to stick to the original play, I might preserve Dummy's Ace of Clubs as an entry, win the King and run the 9
, but I decided to hedge my bets. I inserted the 8 of Clubs and took West's 10 with the Ace in Dummy. I might have played the rest of the hand differently if the 8 had drawn the Queen from West, but now the presence of the 9
in my hand gave me a
much better option:
I left the Hearts alone and played the Ace of Spades and a small Spade, ruffed by my 9. This might be overruffed if West started with 2 Spades and the Queen of Hearts, but now I still have 3 top trumps in Dummy to cope with a
ruff, drawing trumps, and the rest of the tricks will be mine. If the Spades turn out to be 3-3, I
still have the option of a second finesse in Hearts.
In practice West discarded a Club on the third Spade, which mean one of 2 things: Either West had no Hearts or none that could beat the 9,
or this might have been a clever duck from an original holding of
Qxxx. At the table, West didn't strike me as a player good enough to try that kind of gambit, so when I led a Heart and West played low, I hopped up with the Ace, placing East with
KQx or
KQ. The Queen didn't drop, but East did follow to the trick, but now I simply ran the Spades, which were all winners and East could take his Queen whenever he wished.
Bidding and making 4
here was worth 10 IMPs. Lots of people stopped short of game or only made 8 or 9 tricks, presumably having stuck to the
original plan of taking 2 Heart finesses and hoping for 3-3 Spades. West had started with
J3,
64,
AKQ102,
Q1076 and East with
10962,
KQ3,
8743,
42 so any attempts to develop the Clubs were also doomed to failure.