Googly
At the Bhartiya Pairs event on Sat 13th June 2020 this hand came up:
There were many squeeze positions and other possibilities. So I put down some observations and sent it to Sandeep Thakral for his observations. The good part was he agreed the hand was interesting, but, the googly he threw at me was this: Please let me know when South plays in 6NT, West leads Club Jack and East ducks the Club King played from Dummy. Can the squeeze operate without the count being rectified?
I remember reading, (I think it was S.J.Simon) that you can consider yourself a top flight Bridge Player only when you have ducked an Ace and hence defeated a Slam. So I decided to move the expert from chair to chair. He has done his job as East by ducking the Club and not allowing Declarer to rectify the count. I now moved the Expert into the Declarer’s chair. The expert wins Club K, cashes S A notes the 6-0 break and runs 4 Hearts.
The last 7 card position is as under:
When the expert declarer plays his last heart, West is in a quandary. He has earlier, cleverly unblocked Club 10. Now he has to choose between baring K or losing his link with partner. ( The Scissors Coup).The expert declarer will immediately recognize why West is agonizing. In my experience in the Bombay bridge circuit, there were four outstanding players who could quickly figure out the reason for West’s discomforture 1. Bhagwan Shivdasani (Jaggy’s Dad) 2 Mansur Tyebji 3 Ollie Campos and 4 J.M.Shah. I am sure there were many more in Mumbai and the rest of the country but that is another story. And so the average West parts with his club, Dummy sheds the small spade and East parts with a small diamond. Declarer now takes the marked spade finesse and cashes one more spade. Now East is under pressure in the minors. On the Spade 10 he can part with Club 9; but Spade K now wrecks his hand and declarer discards accordingly. Leaving a spade winner on the table, declarer finesses the diamond. West wins King but declarer will have the rest. Now suppose the expert was sitting West. He would see the problem coming from a long way off and would bare the Dia K even before discarding the Club 10. The average declarer noting that East is discarding Diamonds very sparingly while West has thrown one, goes with the odds and finesses the Dia…..and the roof comes down on him !!!