Hand of the Week #39 (Solution) ♣

The club lead is the best lead the defence could find, as we have the fewest cards in that suit. We are forced into playing a club honour from the dummy on the first trick, but that is our concern at the moment, we should be thinking about the whole hand and our plan to make this game. Our longest suit, and thus where are tricks appear to be coming from, is diamonds. Counting our top tricks we have 0 in spades, 4 in hearts, 1 in diamonds and 0 in clubs. Potential for extra tricks, are a slow 2 in spades, 0 in hearts, 5 (!) in diamonds and 1 or 2 in clubs, depending on where the ♣A is. We are missing the ♦K so upon playing the diamond suit we will need to try to finesse there in an attempt to try and avoid losing a diamond trick.

So, play a club honour from dummy at trick 1 and be sad to see East win with their ♣A (would’ve been nice if West had the Ace!). East will most likely continue a club to get rid of your stopper there (any other suit starts establishing tricks for us whilst also allowing us to keep our club stopper) so you are forced to win in the dummy with your remaining club honour (no real point in ducking). Now is time to tackle the diamonds but you need to play them from hand rather than from the dummy so you first need to cross to hand with a heart. Be careful to play a low heart to either the ♥Q or ♥J as we will need our ♥A later! When in hand now play a diamond to any of the ♦QJ10 on the dummy, taking the finesse there. When this wins (phew!) we need to cross back to hand to re-take that diamond finesse as with 2 diamonds still missing, cashing the ♦A will not necessarily fell West’s ♦K. The only way back to hand is in hearts, and therefore we have to play the ♥K from the dummy and overtake it with our ♥A. This enables us to then lead another round of diamonds through West rendering their ♦K well and truly trapped, make sure you cash your last heart winner in hand first though before playing a diamond! On the second diamond from hand, if West plays the ♦K you Ace it and run down all of your diamonds, and if they duck then you re-finesse and then cash your ♦A felling their ♦K on the next round. This play yields 6 diamonds tricks, to go with 3 hearts (not 4 because of the overtake) and 1 club for 10 tricks in total. The defence end up just winning 2 spades and 1 club.

If the diamond finesse had lost to East then you would have been defeated in this contract however the clubs are breaking as the defence would have cashed 2 spades, along with their club winners and diamond trick – we simply needed the diamond finesse to work here. On a different lead we have the time to set up the diamonds wherever the ♦K is, so it was a good lead from West that put us under this pressure.