Saturday, October 22, 2011

Missing extra chances in play


Playing with a new partner, we managed to come 5th out of 100 tables, in part, because unlike others holding my weak hand, I put partner in 6NT. (My 4NT was not Blackwood, it merely invied 6NT. )
However, his play was not the best.
As you can see by playing with the next button, he won the spade continuation, and before testing hearts, committed to the 3-3 break as his only chance. When that came in he made his slam.
The correct way to play the hand is to give yourself a red suit squeeze against RHO as a extra chance. Unblock the black winners. Play three rounds of hearts, testing the suit ending in dummy. If hearts break your 12th trick has come. Proceed as our declarer did, but without the uncertainty.
If hearts are 4-2 (JTxx-xx) with your RHO having the 4 hearts (as is likely on the spade lead), you have a simple show-up squeeze. On the last black winner from dummy, you are down to D:AQ H:x
and your RHO has to discard in front of you with D:Kx H:J
If he holds on to his HJ, you throw your H, and his DK pops up ahead of you, and you have not committed to the H discard.
Poorly played but for a 9.8 IMP pickup at IMP pairs. Who says bridge rewards good declarer play and penalized poor play?

Another interesting point of the hand is a chance to pick up Hxxx - Hx of hearts without caring about the DK. For this line you have to unblock blacks, play HA and HK only, and if a minor honor falls from the LHO, you throw the DQ on the black winners and play for split honors. This loses to xxx-JTx and that would be a hard-luck story to tell.

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Welcome to Ramesh's BRIDGE BLOG

In these pages, I comment on hands from Bridge Base Online ACBL tourneys. I play in these with a variety of partners with different degrees of skill. I might present a hand or two from my collection of bridge books, every now and then. I am more interested in play and defense than in complex bidding systems, but I do follow the cut and thrust of Vanderbilt and World Championship Vugraph and try to keep abreast of expert practice in the obstructive and constructive bidding system department. I may also feature, newspaper-style, famous hands from important matches that I saw on Vugraph.

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Bridge expert for 20 years. I started blogging about bridge only in 2009. Chess follower. Problem fan. Studied hundreds of composition themes in two-movers, fairy chess, the former from the Good Companion era to the modern style of virtual play. Big collector of chess and bridge rare books. My two game blogs bridge blog, and my chess problem themes blog chess expo

My alter ego, The Hideous Hog

My alter ego, The Hideous Hog

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