Hand of the Week #167 (Solution) ♣

In a trump contract you want to look at your losers and how to reduce them, so looking at losers here we have: 2 hearts, 1 club and 1 potential trump loser. There appears to be nowhere for our heart losers or club loser to go so this hand is going to come down to whether we manage to avoid losing a trick to the ♠Q or not. There are two ways we can play this spade suit. One is to just cash the ♠AK and hope the ♠Q drops, and the other play is to finesse by leading a low spade from the dummy and then inserting the ♠J from hand, hoping East holds the ♠Q. The finesse has a 50% chance (slightly higher if you cash a top spade first before going for the finesse as this caters for a singleton ♠Q) and the drops chance increases as you have more and more cards in a suit. With 9 cards in a suit missing the Queen your best odds are to play for the drop (see: this article for more info!).

So, win the opening lead in hand with the ♥A and cash the ♠AK. Here we are simply trusting the odds that the drop is better than finesse when we have 9 cards missing the Queen, and in this hand we are rewarded! The ♠Q drops after 2 rounds and we can simply drive out the ♣A to make our contract, losing just 2 hearts and 1 club for 10 tricks.

Knowing when to finesse and when to drop is an important attribute for any declarer, so learning the ‘trick’ (as outlined in the article linked above) is highly recommended!