whaack

First I messed up the bidding, i jumped to 3h to do a high reverse but 2H was already forcing and rebidding hearts would have shown my hand, and helped us find 7 hearts.

Now the play.

West lead a low heart and i won with the A in dummy, east following. Since i was playing pairs, it was still important to make all 7 tricks. I can do this by developing spades and/or diamonds. Handling entries, timing, and adverse splits is a little tricky on this hand. Let's say that the hearts break 2-2¹ I can play a club to the king, the diamond ace, a heart to the king, (confirming 2-2 diamonds) , A of club pitching a diamond, diamond ruff, spade ace, spade ruff, diamond ruff, if diamonds are 3-2, diamonds are now setup, if not there's still a chance that spades setup from a 4-3 break. If trumps are 3-1 then I have to return to dummy the second time with a trump instead of a spade ruff, so the only hope is that diamonds are 3-2 since I don't have 2 ruffs to setup spades.

The mistake I made was that after playing the ace of diamonds, i returned to my dummy with the ace of spades and a spade ruff, and then attempted to ruff a diamond. I lost an unnecessary trick by using a ruff as an entry instead of a high trump, which would have drawn the opposing force's remaining trumps.

1. 52%, now that i know that each defender has at least one heart. [↩]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 24th, 2025 at 4:13 a.m. and is filed under Contract Bridge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.