whaack

West led the jack of hearts and I took it with my ace and played the same suit to setup for a ruff. RHO won the heart with the 10 and played the king and ace of diamonds, I ruffed the second round. I drew one round of trumps and played a heart. LHO threw in the 7 of spades and I overruffed with the queen.

Now I had to decide how to remove my second heart loser. I could attempt a second ruff, which would work on this layout, but LHO may have been 3-2-4-4 and then he would be able to put in the 5. So I decided to try to find the queen of clubs. I ruffed a diamond in my hand realized that I had a problem. If I took a club finesse and it were wrong, I would lose a club and a heart and go down 1. So I decided to play safe and play RHO for the club, noting that I would have a club heart squeeze should he have the queen of clubs.

But since I was playing matchpoints, this was.a flawed plan. RHO already was found guilty of holding the KQ of hearts and the AK of diamonds, and I could see 22 points, so there were only 6 points left in the deck. For LHO to have had the points required to make his negative double, he had to have had the queen of clubs. My failure to make an overtrick got us a bad board.

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