Finding a Jack

Some hands are just more interesting than others.  Isabelle and I were playing on BBO with David Sabourin and Ucan when this hand came up.  You pick up S Q6 H AQ52 D Q86 C AQ104 and partner opens the bidding with 1S.   I seem to remember that someone once said that any auction that takes 7 rounds of bidding is bound to end badly.  This one was no exception.

David	Isabelle	Ucan	Linda
Pass	1S	Pass	2C
Pass	2D	Pass	2NT
Pass	3C	Pass	3NT
Pass	4C	Pass	4H
DBL	4NT	Pass	5S
Pass	5NT	Pass	6C
Pass	7C	All pass

    

I am going to describe my thought process in the whole mistaken auction looking for some advice. 

I bid 2C over 1S which is usually a game force.  Although I really wanted to have 5 clubs for this bid I am not sure that there is a better one.  Isabelle bid 2D which generally shows an unbalanced hand.  What do you like now?  I suppose I could bid 2H but it looked like I wanted the lead coming up to my hand and I bid 2NT which was game forcing.  Isabelle bid 3C which showed only three clubs because she didn’t raise directly and I bid 3NT which was I think a bit of an underbid.  Isabelle persisted with 4C.  What does that mean?  Can she really have four clubs and decided to bid diamonds first to show the heart void?  It just didn’t seem like her to make the auction that complex.  In any case I think I need to show some slam interest here so I bid 4H.  Isabelle now bid 4NT RKC and than powered on to 7C.  In retrospect I think that I should have bid 7S now.  My Qx of spades look great and she knows that I don’t have anything better than that.  If she wants to she can still bid 7NT.  Anyway I didn’t and this was the dummy after David made the rather curious lead of the S7,

S AKJ105 

H 10   

D AKJ2 

C K75

    

S Q6 

H AQ52 

D Q86   

C AQ104

Ucan plays the S5 and I win the SQ in hand. 

Rats I can see that there are 13 top tricks in notrump and here I am in a 4-3 club fit having to find the CJ.  I am going to have to play the club suit early.  I start with the A and K of clubs and another arriving at the moment of truth.  This is what I see.  At the first club trick David plays the C6 and Ucan the C2, then  David plays the C9 and Ucan the C3.  At Trick 4 Ucan plays the C8 and I have to make a decision.  Stop here.  What do you decide and why?  Before giving you my decision let me tell you that I am working on an as yet untitled book by Julian Laderman on declarer play.  You may remember Julian previously wrote an award winning book on simple squeezes called A Bridge To Simple Squeezes.  You can check it out at www.masterpointpress.com or Amazon or your favourite retailer. (Also, see a sample of that book here.) It would have been helpful to have read the new book before this hand came up because believe it or not he describes this exact situation.  Here is what Julian (who is a mathematician) says 

Let’s consider how to play this suit.  There is a choice whether to play for the jack to drop or whether to finesse the jack.  The decision will probably disappear if declarer procrastinates.  Declarer should obviously play (in my case) the CA and CK first.  If both defenders follow it is clear that our original table for six missing cards are modified.  …. arriving at the point of playing for the drop or  finessing, there are only two possibilities either (Ucan) started with JXXX or (David) started with JXX.  Prior to playing any cards in the suit the chance of the first holding was .16 and the second holding was .18 … The mathematician in my head would say that since both possibilities increase their likelihood proportionately the chance of the second holding is slightly more likely than the first, go with the second.  This is called the percentage play.  However the bridge player in my head is shouting’ ignore the mathematician, he is an idiot." The bridge player is right… 

What Julian is saying is that you have to use all the information you have to make the decision when the percentages are quite close.  Most of the time you would try to get as much of a count on the rest of the hand as you could but here that was impossible.  Okay so what information do I have?  What is this double of 4H?  David is expecting to be on lead why would he double?  Does he have the offside HK?  Even if he had that I don’t think he would double without heart length.  Perhaps he is even suggesting a save.   Even if his sole purpose is to confuse us I think David has at least five hearts for this double.  With more hearts he is more likely to be short in clubs.  Why didn’t David lead a trump?  Would he be more likely not to lead a trump with 9X or with J9X when he knows we have the AKQ.   This wasn’t clear to me but with J9X it did seem a little safer to lead trumps. 

Based primarily on the double of 4H I decided to finesse.  Here is the whole hand

 

	Isabelle
	S AKJ105
	H 10
	D AKJ2
David	C K75	Ucan
S 74		S 9832
H 98753		H KJ4
D 9743		D 105
C 96	Linda	C J832
	S Q6
	H AQ52
	D Q86
	C AQ104

 

 

Well if you bid em badly you better guess em well.