Find the Queens #07-45

IMPROVE YOUR PLAY
with Larry Matheny

If you are going to bid a lot, your declarer play must be top notch. Otherwise, you are going to have to handle a lot of disappointment. Here's a good example..

Scoring: Matchpoints (Pairs)

Hand #45
Dlr	E
Vul	E/W

	AKJ3
	J108
	KJ73
	AK

	8762
	532
	2
	107542

	Q54
	964
	10964
	Q63

	109
	AKQ7
	AQ85
	J98

West	North	East	South
		Pass	1NT
Pass	7NT	All Pass

BIDDING: When this hand was played in a local game, most North-South pairs stopped in 6NT but a few bid aggressively to the grand slam.

PLAY: West led a low club and with twelve obvious tricks, it was clear the thirteenth would most likely have to come from the spade suit. The declarers took three different lines of play. The novices simply took the spade finesse and went down one trick. The intermediate players first played the ace-king of clubs and the spade ace in an attempt to drop one of the black queens. Failing this, they also fell back on the losing spade finesse. At one table a more experienced player saw another solution. He also cashed the club ace-king and spade ace, but then he ran all of their red suit winners. The end position was the

KJ in dummy and the

10 and

J in the South hand. Anyone, East in this case, who held both black queens was squeezed. East had a choice of keeping the spade queen protected and hope his partner held the club jack, or smoothly discarding down to the the two singleton queens. This East took too long to make a decision and finally discarded the club queen and South brought home his grand slam.

Taking a finesse should be the last alternative, not the first.

Copyright ©2007 Larry Matheny.