I sometimes wonder how many hand in books and newspapers are actually composed or at least modified from their original layout. If you read the theory, all these nice end-positions show up frequently. But in practice? Whenever I pick up a hand in a normal game that appears to be a candidate for a book, one or two small cards are in the wrong place and the end-position never occurs. Look at this example from a club game earlier this week. Matchpoints against the second best pair in the club and you end up with this collection in a diamond contract with a club lead.
The auction does provide some clues. As dealer, the auction started with 1♦ from you, 3♠ on your left, a fairly aggressive negative double by partner and 4♣ on your right. 4♣ was fit-showing, a suit and spade support, helping partner to re-evaluate his hand. After that start, you end up in 5♦ with no further bidding from the opponents. That isn’t the best bidding you have shown and I’m sure that some authors would change the final contract to 6♦. It doesn’t matter too much though, as this is match points and the field is such that it won’t always bid the slam, the overtricks do matter anyway.
The opening lead is the ♣8. You obviously have 12 tricks from the top but they haven’t taken their trick yet either. Can you use that to your advantage?
If this was a book...
12 tricks and looking for 13th suggests a squeeze. The play would go something like this. The first trick is something like ♣8, 9, 10, A. You draw trumps and cash a second club with both sides following. That makes the distribution an open book, west has 7♠, 1♦, ♣85 and thus 3 hearts. East then has exactly 4♠=4♥=1♦=4♣. The opening lead puts the ♣QJTx with east. Combining all this information suggests that the EW hands are something like this:
Run the diamonds. East has to keep 4♥ and the ♣Q but that is impossible when the last diamond is played with 5 tricks to go. No guesswork is needed, you simply look for the ♣QJ to appear on the run of the diamonds, if they don’t show up cash the hearts.
If this was too quickly for you, look at the position after 8 tricks on the right
, declarer having played 6 diamonds and 2 clubs, and assuming east hasn’t done anything wrong so-far. West’s cards are irrelevant at this point.
For trick 9, a trump is led and the ♣7 is played by north. East has no good discard.
But in real life...
I ended up playing for the distribution above. Trumps broke 2-0, so west needs to have 8-3-0-2 or such for the squeeze to work. That is fairly unlikely, and it was, the east-west hands turned out to be distributed like this:
East explains his 4♣ bid as an attempt to muddy the waters with his huge fit. That isn’t a bad idea in itself. Anyway, the squeeze doesn’t work and all that this hand is, is another entry in my list of hands that could have made me famous.