More on look before you leap

In a previous post, I had emphasized on planning the play at trick one. The steps of planning were

1. Count your winners
2. Count your losers
3. If you are short of tricks, figure out where the rest of the tricks could come from.
4. If you have no problem with the contract, consider what could go wrong

At times, this step may have to be repeated in the middle of the hand. Consider the hand below where you reach a contract of 7♦ after a rather zany auction of 2NT by by partner to which you respond 6♦ and partner raises you to 7♦

West leads the ♦2. You win in dummy with the Ace and ruff a spade. When you play another diamond to the ♦K, both opponents follow. What now?

How the play went:

Declarer now ruffed one more spade, played a heart to the King and cashed the SA. He received the jolt of his life as West discarded a club and went down in the contract.

You may be wondering where declarer went wrong.

Analysis:

Let us now analyze the hand on the lines that the experts have guided us

1. Once the lead hits the table, we can count 11 winners viz 2 Spades, a Clubs a Heart and 7 trumps
2. We can see four losers in our hand of which two can be disposed on the ♠A and ♠K.
3. If trumps break, we can probably establish the spades for discarding the losers in our hand.
4. The above seems to ensure 13 tricks. What could go wrong? If spades break 5-2, we will have to rely on the heart finesse to engineer a 3rd ruff.

Once the trumps break 2-2, it is prudent to cash the top 2 spades to see whether we need a heart finesse or not. Once we see that the spades are breaking badly, we now ruff a third spade in hand and, holding our breath, we finesse the ♥Q. Once it holds, we can now discard our last loser on the 6th spade and claim the grand slam.

The full hand was

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.