The pendulum – Summer National Pairs – Session 3

You end up in 4♥ on the above auction. Whats your line of play?

♣ from dummy can be discarded on spades, and we have only one diamond as top loser.

Lets see if 12 tricks is a sensible target. To achieve that we need to discard a club on spades and hope that it doesn’t get ruffed. Then we need to contrive to get 6 trumps to go with 5 spades and one club, or 7 trumps 4 spades, or 8 trumps and 3 spades. Most likely situation is when spades break 3-3. So we might as well play them without touching trumps, then ruff a club high and concede a diamond. If they don’t return a trump, we have a complete cross ruff, ruffing 2 diamonds and one club low.

And if they do return a trump, we can win in hand, ruff another club, play the last trump honor in dummy, ruff a diamond back to hand, and if trumps have proven to be 3-2, draw the last trump and then enjoy our spades. 

On this line, if trumps don’t break, we’ll be restricted to 10 tricks. Alternately, we could still play on cross ruff lines and make 11 tricks.

What if spades are not 3-3. If LHO ruffs, we can overruff and concede a diamond. If they don’t return a trump, we have cross ruff for 11 tricks. And on the trump return, we’ll still have 7 trumps, 2 spades and 1 club.

What if RHO ruffs as we discard. He’ll surely return a trump. And if he’s able to win ♦ A, he will return another trump. In this situation, if trumps are 3-2, we’ll still be able to manage 6 trumps, 3 spades and 1 club. But if trumps are 4-1, we will be defeated.

Perhaps its better to set our target to 11 tricks. This is best achieved by ducking the first club. Now we can’t be stopped from either ruffing one club, one spade in dummy and coming to 4 S 6H 1 C, or if they play 2 rounds of diamonds, playing on a cross ruff.

The line that my partner took was perhaps not the best line. He drew two rounds of trumps, and then pitched a club on spades. Ruff and return of a trump resulted in one down.

Interestingly Key and RT were defending 4♠ on this hand, and there was no way to beat after ♣ K lead. A diamond, or high spade lead is required to give defence a chance.