Ross Driedger
Canada-Wide STaC (Sectional Tournament at Clubs)
This was the second last hand of the evening so I will use that as my excuse for the poor bidding. Is it possible to find the exact line of play that will produce 10 tricks? Click on 'Next' to follow the play:
I need much more than I deserve to make this. I have reasonable trumps, but repeated club leads forcing dummy will give me a good deal of trouble. With the K, and very likely the A, of clubs to the left means that the SA, HA and DK are to my right. I need to establish the Spades (requiring them to be 3-3 or 4-2 with J doubleton). If the defense continues to force dummy, I need to pick up the trumps for one loser and there is really only one set up: East has to have AT2 and West the stiff Q -- but that leads to another problem, as we will see shortly.
East hitched before ducking the SK, so I confirmed the position of the SA. Having nothing better to do, I continued Spades. East continued the force of dummy.
So far so good. I took the Diamond finesse knowing it would lose and East continued with a third Club making dummy's trump holding look meagre.
I led the HK off dummy and East hitched again before following low. This was a good sign because he would have won holding the HQ as well. That card tumbled out of West and now the hand was open cards. The problem is that I have no trump on dummy to lead though East. Fortunately, all pieces were in place to execute a grand coup.
East's HT is now trapped. The ruff of the ST at trick 9 was necessary to reduce my trumps to the same number as East's. Why is it a Grand Coup? In order to shorten my trump, I had to ruff one of dummy's winners.
Double dummy, my Diamond finesse was an error. East can win the HA over the K and upset my communications in Diamonds: I cannot ruff the good Spade and safely return to dummy. How hard would it be to find this defense?
Hands like this come up more often that we suspect. In this case, had I not overbid my hand as I did, I would not have found this position. Maybe I should stop bidding like this...not when I come across little gems like this.