Hand of the day #242
The Aces On Bridge by Bobby Wolff The old-fashioned textbooks tell you to lead k...
The Aces On Bridge by Bobby Wolff
We all suspect that the true expert will always follow a line that results in a squeeze rather than take the pedestrian 50 percent chance. Certainly, a good player will know when what at first appears to be a 50-50 chance has been reduced by the bidding or play to a much less attractive option than that.
Opening Lead: ♥2
Consider the play in today’s six spades on a heart lead. North’s jump to five spades asked his partner to bid slam with a heart control, by the way. Declarer puts in the jack, losing to the king (and yes, if East intends to shift, he should win the first trick with a deceptive heart ace). East duly switches to the diamond 10 at trick two. Declarer wins the king, cashes the top spades, then takes the two remaining high diamonds. This discloses that East began with two diamonds and one spade, and since West would have led the top of a doubleton heart, that East has six hearts. So East began with four clubs and West has just two clubs, making the club finesse irrelevant.
Declarer now simply plays off two more trumps, pitching clubs from the table to reduce to a four-card ending. East is down to the guarded heart king and three clubs. If he throws a heart away, declarer cashes the club king, ruffs a heart, and dummy is high. If he pitches a club, declarer takes both top clubs and ruffs a heart to score his club jack at trick 13.
Bid with the aces
Answer: 3♣
Any time the opponents have bid and raised a suit at a low level, it makes sense to play takeout doubles. Here, your partner rates to have exactly four spades and approximately invitational values. While you could bid two no-trump, you can see the danger in the heart suit. Better is a simple call of three clubs.
This Hand of the Day was originally published on aces.bridgeblogging.com.
