Today's deal is from an IMPs match. What seemed an easy contract, suddenly became difficult
when declarer came to know the foul split in spades after the opening lead. Yet he found a
brilliant solution.
See if the solution occurred to you.
The bidding is as explained above. After South signed off with a minimum 16HCP, North had considerable extras. In addition to being near the slam zone, he judged that with an eight card fit in 2 suits, there should be a play for 12 tricks and, accordingly, bid the slam.
West leads the S5, lowest from odd. You play the nine from dummy. East ruffs. Plan the play.
Do think about what you may like to do before you read on.
Analysis
South was naturally rattled with the ruff. However, he needed to see a path to 12 tricks. If one goes with the normal analysis we can see that
- We have 2 club losers and one diamond loser in our hands. The diamond loser can arguably be ruffed in dummy and a club can be ostensibly chucked on a spade after trumps are drawn.
However, we may face entry problems as we may not be able to both engineer a diamond ruff and draw trumps in time to enjoy a spade pitch.
Secondly a diamond finesse alone will not help us get rid of our club losers as we may not be able to ruff two clubs in dummy and both draw trumps and get a spade pitch
So what should we do?
- We appear to have all the tricks except one. It occurs to us that a squeeze may work if West ends up guarding two suits, i.e. spades and another. It seems that all the BLUE conditions will be met.
For those uninitiated to the term, which was coined by Clyde E Love (who wrote the bible on squeezes) means that for a squeeze to be present (from declarer's point of view), we must have a condition called "BLUE". Of course there are other types of squeezes (see: Adventures in Cardplay by Ottlik and Kelsey) which might not fall under this, but most of them do.BLUE is:
- B : All cards in victim's hand are Busy.
- L : Loser count is correct (Rectifying the count, typical one loser for most squeezes)
- U : At least one threat is in the Upper hand (lies in the hand that plays after the victim)
- E : The hand threat in the hand opposite the squeeze card has an Entry with it.
For entry purposes, we can create an entry by discarding the Ace of Spades!
Play
Accordingly, when East ruffed the opening lead, declarer dumped the ♠A!
East shifted to the ♣9 to the two, ♣J, and the ♣A.
Declarer now cashed ♦K and ♦A. When declarer played the ♦J next, West ruffed with the ♥7 and dummy over ruffed with the ♥8.
Declarer then reeled off trumps to squeeze West in the black suits.
The complete hands were:
Afterword
Did you realize that if declarer fails to follow with the ace at trick one, he goes down? This spectacular unblocking play to get the ace out of the way is extra-ordinary.
Did you find the play? or were you just ordinary?
Disclaimer : All opinions are entirely those of the author and are no reflection of the views of the BridgeFromHome Team.
I scrolled down and didn’t read past problem syatement (still have not).
once spade is tuffed, spade 2 is more valuable and more powerful than spade ace.
We have 2 natural spade tricks and spade 2 allows us to take those with dummy access, while spade ace blocks dummy access. A few permutations come up involving squeezes, but the base permutation requires nothing fancy, just 22 remaining H.
Spade ace then say H return…win in dummy back to hand. Find H 22, now its a claimer…spade finesse spade ruff spade, D to dummy another spade ruff now D D ruff in dummy enjoy 2 spades for club discards.
This permutation is dependent on club ace so best def can do is lead club. but if KJ club split this may give away trick 12. Finally if H 31 we may not be able to take 2 spade ruffs, but club spade squeeze may be worked out.
Definitely the sort of hand to open up minds and shake up lazy play instincts (low under spade ruff is a lazy instinct)
imo this is far from the best line unless you can be absolutely sure that lho has CK.
better is CA, HK and if no J or T appears from W, continue with HQ.
if W started with 2 H you now have 12 tricks 5H, 1C, 2D , 1 Ruff, SK,T and 4 which you can establish.
as it happens W has 3 H and so ruff is not available. However you still establish the long spade. S to ten , ruff, H to Ace , ruff. DK cash good spades and finesse diamond. which is more likely to succeed than S C squeeze given empty spaces.
Dear Sandeep,
Thanks for writing in
As usual, your comments give good insights on various possibilities