Thursday, February 08, 2007

Wrong contract isn't always a disaster

I haven't had much interesting hands lately. This is the only interesting one, where we ended up in the wrong contract:

Dealer:North
Vul:Both
Scoring:imps
T875
654
A82
A43
KQ643
KJ93
T
QT6
J92
AQ82
43
9852
A
T7
KQJ9765
KJ7

The auction went:
pass - pass - 1 - Dbl
pass - 1 - 3 - pass
3 - pass - 4 - pass
5 - all pass

I considered a 3 opening immediately since partner passed, but the hand was just too strong. On the next round, since partner passed (no RDbl), it was probably best to jump in for several reasons. Now partner came in action and later regretted he asked for a stopper instead of hoping for a 4-4 split. 3NT is laydown, 5 can be defeated. Anyway, after trick 2 I knew I was pretty safe.

LHO started with a to his partner's Ace. He made the wrong choice. Think about it: what is the best continuation and why?

He switched to a small , after which it was pretty easy to squeeze LHO in and . Thanks to the Double and the lead I knew RHO had some values left in , so the finesse would not work.
A switch can ruin my communications for a squeeze later on, but I wonder how he could know to switch and not . Even if he plays a now, he needs to overtake J and return another in the next trick.

So I took A and played my last , rectifying the count. LHO took his J (which held) and tried K which I ruffed. I only needed to ruff 2 s to set up T as a menace, to combine with my extended menace, A and K taking care of the communication. K is not necessary, but the Ace is vital.

After ruffing one more and running s, LHO got trouble. He had to keep Q and QTx. He tried the , but that didn't help, the hand was an open book. A, followed K pinned the Q and 5=.

As you can see, I don't need K in the end game because it's a positional squeeze: if LHO discards a my T is high, otherwise I discard and pin the Q.

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