From                   17th October, 2007, Board 3

                                          Difficulty            * * * 

                                          Dlr South           E-W Vul

East starts out with the Club Two, which is explained as being a 3^rd and 5^th lead.

The opponents have pushed you perilously high, and making 9 tricks will depend upon not losing a second Spade trick.

What is the distribution of the black suits, and how do you propose to use this information to maximize your chances?

SOLUTION

East has 3 or 5 Clubs, based on the opening lead, and surely it’s 5, we don’t think that West started with 6 (and if she did we cannot make the contract anyway).  West must have 4 Spades, he would not have made a delayed Double with less, and East would no doubt have led a singleton Spade if he had one.  So, West is 4-4 in the black suits, how about the reds?  We’d better assume that Hearts are 3-2 (4-1 would sink us unless the Jack were singleton), which means that we should play this hand on the assumption that West is 4-2-3-4 or 4-3-2-4.

Eventually, we may have to guess the Spades, but even then we might lose the 4^th round of Spades and still go down.  But there is an extra chance, which is to play on Diamonds first, nothing bad can happen if we do, and something good might develop.  So, we win the second round of Clubs on the board, and play a Diamond.  The defense wins that and returns a trump.  Now we lose another Diamond.  This is the full deal:

As luck would have it, the J♥ is doubleton, providing us with an unexpected entry to Dummy’s Diamonds, so no Spade guess is required.  And, if the J♥ had not so conveniently dropped on the second round?  Then the way to play the Spades is to lead the Q♠ from hand, forcing an entry to the board whenever East holds the Jack or the Ace.  If we firmly believe that East must have started with two Spades, then the chances of this are 9 out of 15, or 60%.  Combine that with the earlier chance of a doubleton Jack (40% if we trust the suit to be 3-2), and we have a 76% line of play.

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