whaack

Once again the handviewer bidding is bugged, the contract is played by south.

Let's go over how I got this problem wrong.

West leads the jack of hearts which rides up to your king. Plan your play.

I knew that the problem had something to do with a squeeze and squashing the ten of hearts. Since our opponents let us win the first trick¹, we don't have the count rectified for a normal squeeze. Let's say that right hand opponent was dealt 4 spades along with the ace of hearts. When we play our last club and pitch a heart, east can hold the ace of hearts and 2 spades. Note that if we could force everyone to discard a card from our 3 card holdings, RHO would be squeezed.

Let's analyze the situation If LHO lead from AJT of hearts, and was also dealt 4 spades. Same situation. LHO could keep 2 spades and the ace of hearts. Except this time they would be forced to discard before we discard from the dummy, so if we saw the 10 of hearts played, we would be able to pitch a spade and then promote our heart 9 by playing the heart queen at the third to last trick. In this vice squeeze, we are able to make up for the fact that we don't have the count rectified by being able to promote a card at the third to last trick.

What if the spades had been 3-3, would there be anyway to get a 12th trick? No. If LHO has the AT, he will hold onto those, and RHO will hold 2 spades and a heart. If RHO has the ace of hearts, then LHO will hold onto hearts and RHO will hold onto 2 spades and 2 hearts. When declarer has to pitch the fourth card from dummy, RHO will pitch whatever suit declarer pitches.

When I played this hand I correctly setup the vice, but I didn't track the discards. I saw that LHO had pitched a spade at some point, and I remembered he had followed when I played the ace of spades. So in my mind he had "pitched" 2 spades. But he didn't pitch 2 spades, he pitched one spade and followed suit to one spade. So instead of playing a heart at the third to last trick I played a spade and another, and the defense took their spade and ace of hearts.

1. It's interesting to note that even if RHO had 4 spades, in this hand it would still be right to duck. Although he would have to guard hearts and spades, we'd have no way to safely rectify the count. [↩]

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2026 at 3:26 p.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.