Declarer play in trump contracts is all about taking care of the losers in hand. The presence of shortage in dummy can help you to ruff the losers there. Sometimes, you will be able to discard your losers on dummy’s winners.
However, there are more techniques which the upcoming player can easily add to his arsenal without getting into too many complications.
Take the south seat in today’s deal from an IMP pair contest and see whether you can find the play.
Against your contract of 4♥ by south. West leads the ♦8. RHO wins with the queen as you insert the jack from dummy. East switches to the ♠K. Plan the play
Analysis
In accordance with what we have learnt we
- Count your winners
We can see 8 winners. 4 Hearts, 3 Clubs and the Spade Ace. We can definitely ruff a spade in hand which makes 9. - Count your losers
We can see 3 possible diamond losers and perhaps the heart queen - If you are short of tricks, figure out where the rest of the tricks could come from
Please see analysis below - If you have no problem with the contract, consider what could go wrong
RHO seems to have K-Q-J-x-x in spades and A-Q-T-9 in diamonds. As you have three losers in diamonds, it appears that you need to locate the queen of hearts for the success of the contract.
However, if you can force RHO to be on lead, you will be able to get rid of one of the 4 losers show above
How can we do that?
Play :
With the objective of either finding the heart queen or forcing east to give you a trick, you now begin with winning the ♠A and ruffing a spade in hand.
We now cash the ♥K and cash the top three clubs ending in hand.
With the stage finally being set right (assuming both opponents follow to the clubs), we now run the ♥J...... And wait to claim the contract!
The complete hand was
If the ♥Q drops on the left or the finesse works, we have only 3 diamond losers. If East has the ♥Q, he is forced to either give you the ♦K, or return a black suit which will give you a ruff and discard!
Isn't this an elegant solution????
Technique
Let us now look over what we have done. We first eliminated all the spades in our hand.
Then we cashed the ♥K. Should the ♥Q drop, our problems would have been immediately solved.
Since it didn't, we cashed 3 Clubs and then took the finesse.
This technique in known as Elimination Play or, more simply, Strip and Throw In. This is something we should be all looking at when the contract appears difficult.
Please note that this line of play need not work 100% of the time.
For our line of play to succeed, we needed West to have at least 2 hearts. We also needed East to have 3 Clubs else, if he had 2 trumps, he would cash the ♦Ace and give partner a ruff. Even if East had three trumps, he will now exit with the ♥Q and wait to collect his diamonds.
Finally if East has 3 trumps with the Queen and 3 clubs, the contract will fail as we cannot now set up a ruff and discard situation. In this case, a simple heart finesse against East would work.
The line we took simply caters to more distributions!
Did you play the hand right?
Do let us know in the comments section below!
Disclaimer : All opinions are entirely those of the author and are no reflection of the views of the BridgeFromHome Team.