Better Declarer Play – Suit Combinations

I decided I might write up some of my thoughts on improving my declarer play and I am hoping for lots of help and feedback.

If you are wondering why I haven’t posted recently I have had a series of unfortunate circumstances.  My computer developed a serious brain disease and went in for major surgery.  Since this resulted in wiping most of its memory I have had to do a lot of retraining.  Then I had to turn myself in for dental surgery and now I seemed to have caught Ray’s flu.  However my computer and I are doing well and should be fine soon.

I have been thinking about the value of learning how to handle some common combinations and creating an approach to making some of these choice.  Obviously there are many factors in a deal that make affect what you might do.  Still it seems worthwhile to think about the a priori odds in certain situations and not have to deduce them at the table.  I do remember a hand I played in the district final of the Open Canadian Team Championship where I had to make a decision at the table about the best way to play a particular combination.  As it turned out the way I played it didn’t work and my teammates did suggest it probably wasn’t with the odds when we discussed it over dinner.  I spent several hours later working out all the odds (I am not all that good at it) and decided that my line was fractionally better than the choice that worked.  That didn’t really bring my joy though.

Here is a simple combination.  You are playing in a slam.  You don’t have any real information about the opponents hands.  Your trump suit is

7

AQ106543

You have to play this combination for one loser.  You are missing the KJ982.  You could play A and then the Q, A and then little, small to the Q small to the 10.  Assuming RHO follows little what is the best approach?

There is no 4-1 (or 5-0) combination that you can pick up (assuming there is no trump coup) so we can zero in on the 3-2’s.  So I can’t see anyway that playing the Ace helps.  So that narrows it down to what is better the Q or the 10.  And I don’t think it matters, its just a guess.  You just don’t want to lose to the inappropriate doubleton honor offside. 

I guess the approach at the table is to start with the number of tricks I need and then work out what distribution is relevant and then pick a line that handles most of those cases, taking into consideration the quality of the opposition and whatever information I already have.  In the above case you would probably play the 10 if RHO had preempted playing him for JXX not KXX.

Let’s make it harder.  You have

73

AQ10654

Now I can pick up some of the 4-1 combinations.  It seems like the best play for four tricks is two finesses but the Official Encyclopedia did point out something.  It is better to finesse the queen first.  If you finesse the 10 and it loses to the singleton king it doesn’t help you.  But you can hold your losers to one if LHO has the singleton jack by finessing the Queen first.  It is not the best play for the most tricks but it is the best play for four tricks.

Now what I need to do is figure out which combinations I need to memorize and which ones I can work out at the table.  Any suggestions?  Bridge is not an easy game.

The encyclopedia of bridge has about 55 pages of these combinations or 656 examples. 

Here is another case.   You need the same one loser and four tricks and you have

A9xxx

Q108

The way I learned this is lead the Queen first and if that loses finesse the 10.  This is essentially right but the encyclopedia suggests that against weaker opponents it is better to play small to the 10 first.  The idea is that the hand with Kx in front of the queen would rise.  If this loses to the Jack then lead the Queen and finesse next.  If it loses to the King then you should finesse the 8.  (This assumes that  with KJ doubleton LHO would never falsecard.

656 examples seems like a lot but it does seem possible to memorize them.  If you did just two a day (and say two revisions to make sure you hadn’t forgotten them) you could memorize them in a year.  You could probably drop about half of them since they are similar.  Or maybe I could find the top 100 and just memorize those.

What do you think?

Of course the opponents and your intuition can change all that.

Then I remember having a holding something like this

KJ9xx

xxx

I was in five diamonds after my partner (Irene Hodgson) and I had a bidding misunderstanding as four spades would have been best.  Irene was upset and left the table.  I had to play this suit for one loser and I knew if I blew it then we were going to lose the event, not only because it was close but because there would be black smoke at the table.  I think the textbook play is to finesse the 9 playing for Q10x onside but there was something about the way RHO seemed to twitch and it took me a millisecond to play small to the Jack.  I still don’t know why.  This fetched the stiff 10 offside and kept Irene talking to me.   

My intuition has served me better than mathematics on a number of other occasions.