Moments of Clarity

In my eternal quest for improved counting, my partner and I played a few hands against the robots on BBO last night. The goal was to take our time.

The most interesting hand of the night was this one:



At this point, I knew the location of every single high card. Yay me! Unfortunately, I couldn't see a way forward.

From the bidding, partner has precisely 6 or 7 HCP. The king of diamonds on trick 2 was 3, so that leaves 3-4.

Trick 1 showed me that partner had no spade higher than the 7. When partner later played the 4, that left declarer with AJT9 of spades.

The heart play on trick 5 was bizarre. Clearly, partner had something in hearts, but what? With the ace, declarer would have KQJ..., which wasn't consistent with his play. If partner had the king, the finesse seemed obvious. The only holding that seemed to make sense for partner was KJ. With me having the ten 9, declarer held either AQx or AQxx, and thus had an unavoidable heart loser.

This accounted for all 7 of partner's possible points, so declarer had Axx or Axxx in diamonds. (Admittedly, I didn't have the exact distributional count until the end of the hand.)

Clubs was also a big clue in my deductions. I knew declarer had at least 2 clubs, and I now knew that declarer had the AJ. With AJx, declarer would have attacked clubs long ago, seeking to establish the suit. Thus, declarer had to be AJ bare.

This was just about the limit of my vision. I felt like I couldn't lead back clubs, because that would establish the suit for declarer. I wanted to entice him to misguess the suit, leading towards the king, then back towards his AJ, finessing the Queen rather than playing for the drop. This is of course impossible, but I couldn't quite visualize the play well enough.

I also didn't want to finesse partner's heart holding. Yes, it I had the T9, and yes declarer could cross to dummy and finesse hearts himself, but I didn't want to do it for him.

Knowing declarer had both hearts and spades stopped, I just returned a spade.

It turns out there was nothing I could do.



On the second round of spades, partner discarded a club, and declarer ran clubs to make an overtrick.

Partner lamented his club discard, but it turns out that, at this point, partner is squeezed. Partner holds the stops in clubs, hearts AND diamonds, and declarer can run his two spade tricks, making him discard twice. Partner will be obligated to either discard a club, promoting the clubs, a diamond, promoting the two of diamonds, or a heart, promoting the queen of hearts.

If there's a way to stop the overtrick, it must come up before trick 5. I certainly didn't see it.

All that said, if I saw every hand with the clarity that I saw this hand, I'd be improving by leaps and bounds.