[Phil]

Had a whopping six tables today, including me playing as a fill-in.

I thought that was an interesting hand:

---

Apparently partner liked his ruffing values along with his four trump so you end up in 4♠. You smile as LHO leads the ♣A. The smile leaves when the ♣J which gets ruffed. RHO exits the ♥J. You play the ♠Q from hand and LHO throws a club.

Now?

[matmat]

nice hand.

[jschafer]

Spoiler

Cash the ♦A, draw trumps, strip the side suits and try throw LHO in with the ♦King (or Q/J if RHO is sleeping).

[wank]

jschafer, on 2010-December-25, 05:17, said:

Spoiler

Cash the ♦A, draw trumps, strip the side suits and try throw LHO in with the ♦King (or Q/J if RHO is sleeping).

might as well lead the diamond off dummy in case you get some injudicious splitting of honours from east.

[nige1]

Thank you Phil A good problem which I got completely wrong

[matmat]

Spoiler

I am not convinced cashing the ♦A early is correct.
Also, I think you need to be very careful with what trump spots you use up when drawing trump.

LHO is 0616 or 0526.

we need to get a count on the hearts to decide how we are playing the diamonds. Having started with the spade queen, for some strange reason, we can't do this safely before we finish drawing trump, so we gave up the flexibility of what hand we get to lead diamonds from. (edit, we don't really have that much flexibiltiy, i guess, we need to cash the top club after ruffing the third heart.

If LHO is 0616 then we need the singleton diamond to be an honor. we exit with a small diamond from hand. Whether RHO can overtake or not is immaterial, if they do we have AT over the remaining honor, if they don't LHO is endplayed. LHO can try to avoid this by throwing their diamond honor on the third round of trump. If this happens, we eliminate the hearts, confirming the distribution, cross over to the ♠3 (we kept the 2, right?) and lead a diamond up to ATx. if RHO splits the remaining honors, we duck.

If LHO is 0526, then Ace and another will not work (double dummy) against honor-small doubleton, since LHO will unblock (this is a case where cashing the ace early might work, catching LHO unaware). What you can play for is LHO holding two of the three diamond honors, exiting ace of diamonds, diamond to endplay them.
If LHO unblocks a diamond honor under the third round of trumps, we have a guess. They might have unblocked from Hx or HH. Unblocking from the former would be a Grosvenor, since you can't make if that was their remaining holding, they can counter any of your diamond plays. So you have to try to exit small.

I usually miss something, so I am fairly certain I missed something here.

[another edit --
Even if LHO fails to unblock the ♦K under the ace, they have three more chances to do this when you draw trumps.
]

[Phil]

Sorry, you didn't cash the ♠Q early.

Its a tricky hand I think. LHO appears to be 0-6-1-6. What you would like to do is draw trump, strip out the round suits (and cashing the ♦A), and play the ♥T ditching a diamond. But there's a transportation problem, since you would need to play a 4th trump to dummy after you draw trump, since you would have to cash clubs in hand first.

So you are back to a more mundane layout of playing LHO for a singleton diamond honor. ♥K, ♠ to dummy, ruff the heart, ♠Q to ♠ to dummy, and here's where it gets critical.

- If LHO pitches a round card, ♣ to K, low diamond from hand hoping for a dry honor in LHO;
- If LHO gets cagey and discards the diamond honor, lead a low diamond from the board without cashing the ♣ honor. RHO splits and you duck. RHO has nothing but diamonds left.

However, at the table, RHO actually held ♥Jxx (?!) and LHO was 0=5=2=6. But she also held ♦QJ so there was no escape.

[Fluffy]

discarding ♦Q is the escape