[inquiry]

Yes I know that I said I wouldn't put levels on these things, but this one is so straight forward, I decided I had to place it in this forum. This is yet another one from my 6NT files.

This is a real hand, misplayed and most would say miss bid, in a recent BBO IMP tournament. Why miss bid? South only had 19 HCP (many, many people are opening 2NT with 19 hcp these days, but south did alert it as 20-21 hcp, and he didn't have any feature I would use to upgrade the hand. And north could have bid 3♥ (transfer to spades known as jacoby transfer) then if he wanted bid 5NT for pick a slam (notrump or spades). If this was a 6♠ contract, you would have a somewhat similar problem, but might have gotten a different opening lead.

Things start off nicely for you when you win the opening diamond lead in dummy and the spade finesse wins (click Next to see the first two tricks) . Your only concern here is to win 12 tricks. What is your line?

This one is meant for new players and beginners, so intermediate and above hide your answers using the spoiler tags. To add spoiler tag, you can click the "other style" drop down box, come down to spoiler, and type your text in the supplied box. Or you can use short hand. Place the work spoiler inside square brackets, type your text. At the end of your text, playce the /spoiler inside square brackets (I can't show how it looks normally, but below in code shows how.

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[spoiler] Random text to be hidden [/spoiler] 

The above shown in a code box, if entered without code box gives the following, click show to display.

Spoiler

Random text to be hidden

This post has been edited by inquiry: 2014-May-12, 11:31
Reason for edit: To show how to add spoiler

[gszes]

Spoiler

Safety play time we already have 3 dia 3hea 2cl so we only need 4 spades
trick 3 heart to dummy
trick 4 spade 9 intending to finesse if rho plays low this will assure us
of 4 spade tricks whenever rho began with 4 spades.

If rho shows out on the 2nd spade we rise with the A and lead toward the spade J
just in case lho began with KTxx and for some reason ducked the spade K at trick 2.
The only play we lose by playing this way is going back to dummy (after trick 2
and playing the spade J in the hopes of smothering the spade T doubleton in LHO hand
trying for the unimportant overtrick but losing the contract if lho ducked holding
KTxx at trick 2.

[inquiry]

Gszes got it 100% right, even naming the correct play. As typical of most beginner-level problems, there was little answers. When this hand was played well more than half the field took less than 12 tricks. Of course, not everyone got the diamond lead so many of those might have gotten spades right but lost a diamond or a club when they guessed the minor wrong. If you don't see how Gszes answer works, take the spades out of a deck of cards, and split them around the table a few ways to see what happens with different layout of the opponents cards.

Despite the lack of interest in this easy hand, I think it was an important lesson for newer players, so I will include a couple more, starting with Play 008 (I am saving play 007 for a "killer hand").

[Zelandakh]

inquiry, on 2014-May-13, 08:49, said:

(I am saving play 007 for a "killer hand").

Perhaps you should use it for a "Find the lady" type of hand.

[Cyberyeti]

I'm somewhat mystified why a beginner would upgrade a 4333 19 count to 20-21.