Hand of the Week #226 (Solution) ♠

Looking at this hand, it seems to ‘play itself’ as we can simply win the heart lead on the table and lead the ♠9, looking to draw trumps and finesse North for the missing ♠K at the same time. This play is a fine play, and will avoid a loser in spades if North has the King AND if they break 3-2. If the spades break 4-1 or worse then North will be able to hold onto their ♠K long enough for us to run out of spades to lead from the table. Are we doomed to lose a spade then if they are breaking badly? Well, no. Not necessarily. In the case where North has 4+ spades with the King, we could perform a ‘trump coup’, which would be to ruff in our hand sufficient times so we have the same amount of remaining trumps as North, and we can then force North to ruff in before us, thus giving up their ♠K. As for losers in the other suits, we are sure to lose 1 heart, 2 diamonds and 1 club. As you can see above, this trump coup play is going to be necessary to avoid losing a trick to North’s ♠K.

So, win the ♥A on the table and immediately lead the ♠9 from the dummy, looking to finesse. When North ducks, we should duck from hand too, and South follows with a small spade. The first good sign is that the finesse was successful, so we should lead dummy’s last spade towards our ♠AQJ10x in hand, and when North ducks once more we should insert one of the ♠Q, ♠J or ♠10. This wins again, but we get the bad news about the spade split, so North is left with ♠Kx in their hand. It is at this point we need to stop playing trumps and try to pull off the trump coup. Play a small diamond from hand letting North win and see what they do next. When in with the diamond, North should play another heart, being passive and giving us the lead back. We should win in hand with the ♥K and then look to give the lead away once more with our last small diamond. North again wins and should play another heart. South wins this heart trick and should then play yet another heart, which we can ruff in hand, with North likely discarding a low club. This ruff in hand brings us closer to the trump coup. We now have 3 trumps in hand, while North still has 2. Next we should play a club towards the table and assuming South ducks (which they should!) we can win with the ♣J. When on the table, we can then elect to ruff a diamond in hand, reducing our trumps down to 2. Now give up the lead by leading out the ♣Q, which is squashed by South’s ♣A. In this 2 card ending, we can see that North has ♠Kx left only and we have ♠AQ (or equivalent) left in hand. Whatever South leads, North is forced to ruff before us and we can simply over-ruff and cash our last spade. A trump coup successfully achieved! We lose just 1 heart, 2 diamonds and 1 club to make an overtrick in 2♠ for +140.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to just give up a trick to the ♠K given the above layout and just accept that you are making 2♠ exactly, but why not try for the overtrick? It is relatively low risk to leave North with 2 trumps left, and we could get to the ending as above when North makes no trump tricks whatsoever! It is this kind of greedy declarer play that leads to good scores when playing matchpointed pairs, as every trick matters!