I’m pretty sure that there is no scientific foundation for this, but it seems to sometimes happen that you run across a rare line of play or infrequent auction once, only to see the same thing come up a couple of times more in the following weeks. My latest series of hands started with this one, from a workshop at ‘t Onstein a couple of weeks ago. IMP-pairs, you are declarer in 6NT, on the ♥10 lead. Plan the play.
You count 11 tricks, with 2 options for a 12th. Obviously, you can finesse the ♣J. An alternative is to play a small spade from dummy towards the ♠Q. If it wins, that is east has the ♠K, you have just scored your 12th trick. If east rises with the ♠K, your ♠Q will be the 12th trick a little later. If west takes your ♠Q, then there is always the club finesse left.
Timing is important though, if you try the club finesse before playing a spade to ♠Q, and it fails, then the spade play is irrelevant: if east has the ♠K, he will simply go up and take the setting trick. You will have established a 12th trick, but the opponents have their 2 tricks already.
Bottom line: make the play where you have to lose a trick first. As this was a practice hand, west indeed had the ♣Q and east the ♠K.
This theme came back last week when I picked up this hand. I found myself in 4♠ with no bidding from the opponents. Club lead to the ♣A and a club return, which you ruff. Again, plan the play.
Again, there is a finesse but that will fail half of the time. There is also an option to set up hearts by playing twice towards the ♥QJxxx. If west has a high heart, or the suit splits 3-3, you can establish a heart trick and don’t have to decide anything about the diamond suit. With that in mind, draw 2 trumps ending in south then play a heart.
The best the opponents can do, is to win the trick in east and return a diamond. That forces you to make a decision in that suit before you know about the heart position. However, do not assume that the opponents are perfect, there are lots of ways they can get this wrong: win the first heart trick in west or win it in east but don’t return a diamond. And even if they do get it right, you still have the diamond finesse. In practice, it hardly mattered what you did, as hearts broke 3-3 but the diamond finesse was also on.
Now, this hand from a recent duplicate should be trivial. You are in 4♥ after east opened the bidding with 1♦, pass from you, 2♦ on your left and double from your partner. West leads a trump. Over to you.
The contract appears to be a little high with 3 certain losers and a club finesse that, considering the opening bid, is more likely to be off than on. But, again, there is an alternative you can try first: play a spade to the ♠10. If west has the ♠J, that will set up 2 spade tricks for your side and you can use those to discard your clubs.
So, a trump lead to your ♥A, a trump to the ♥Q and a spade to the ♠10.
The opponents get it right though, the ♠10 loses to the ♠K (great), but a diamond comes back to west’s ♦A and a club is returned. Now you are forced to take the finesse, it fails, and you are down 1. Going up with the ♣A would not have worked either. Down 1 for an average score, but at least you gave yourself a small extra chance to make the contract.
After these 3 hands, you should never get a position like this wrong again.
Finally, some feedback to correspondence. First, there is the 6♥ hand I discussed last Friday. Over the weekend, the NPC of the EW pair mailed me. Apparently, there is a round of bidding missing after the double of 3♦. The final result was correct and the NPC said that after east passed 6♥x, he went for a drink. Note that corrections and remarks about hands are always welcome, even though I may not always have time to respond to your comments. Click here to contact me.
Then, Hans Metselaar invited me to the 22nd edition of the Bridge Week in The Hague in August. Hans asked me to forward the details all my bridge playing friends and I’m happy to do that: From Saturday August 4 until Sunday 12, there will be a series of tournaments: Mixed, Men/Women’s pairs, Teams, Open Pairs, at the SBS Bridge Home in The Hague. It has been a while since I last played there, the event is always held early August and that coincide with the family holiday, but the last time I played there, it was a very nice event. Hans is always busy to improve, so I’d guess it to be even better by now. For more information, look at the facebook page or the website.
Finally, people have been asking me if anybody is reading this blog. Well, you know, I’ve asked myself that question too. Fortunately, I do have access to all logfiles from the webserver where this blog is hosted. Time to write some code and extract information about page hits. Here is the result:
The columns show the various articles, sorted by the publication day. I then looked for the number of unique visitors to that article, where an unique visitor is a particular computer accessing the page. That isn’t entirely correct, but it is close enough. If you want to see which article was published when, look at the archive.
As you can see, each article averages about 100 readers, with a few peaks, which is more than enough motivation for me to continue. More readers are always welcome, just point them to http://www.uijterwaal.nl/henks_hands.html.