Thursday, March 16, 2017

A neat deal. Squeeze play in 6NT

An agricultural auction landed me in 6NT. With the spades breaking, the only testing lead is a heart (else I can establish four spade tricks by losing a spade trick). I misguessed at trick one, or there would be no story. When the Queen was covered by the King, I rectified the count for a possible squeeze by ducking

When E continued hearts, I won, and worked on a double squeeze with the following threat cards H7, CJ, and the third round spade. I had to watch the discards for H8,T,J, CQ and there were guard squeeze possibilities. Indeed, after I cashed C AK, pitching spades, and ran a few diamonds, the first key end position was this, with East having to choose from three evils. If he blanks his SQ, I play a spade to King and pick up the J on a finesse. He cannot let go a Club or dummy's J promotes into a twelfth trick. He chose to be squeezed out of HIS heart guard. On the same trick, I let go the now useless CJ, and his partner was simple squeezed in hearts and spades

Notice that at trick two, East can break up the doubly guarded suit entry by shifting to a low spade, not a easy shift to find.

I shared this deal with my bridge partner, who looked me up and down, and said, the play was not bad, but next time do bid TWO CLUBS and you may get to the laydown SEVEN DIAMONDS. What are partners for?

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.

NOTE: For JUNE, I am experimenting with adding BBO's Handviewers, which make bridge movies embedded. Just
scroll down beyond the few sampled book covers and you arrive at the blogs that play themselves with the NEXT button. THANKS, BBO!!

About Me

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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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