Never give up, there’s always a chance for a squeeze

I was playing with my mentee yesterday.  First true confessions.  When we play I usually accept opponents of any level.  They can see that I am playing with an intermediate and I usually write on the description, teaching table.  Anyway,  yesterday I wound up with a really good player on my left which is just fine but unfortunately he was a bit too competitive including “yelling” (in an online way) at his partner.  It is a bit harder for me to handle a very aggressive and demanding expert when I am playing with an intermediate so when this deal, about the last we played, came up I made an aggressive, well crazy bid.  I promise I really tried hard to make normal, standard and sane bids with a mentee but forgive me for this one.  Here is my hand

KJ107
A109
void 
QJ8653

I opened 1 and Mr Aggressive bid 5.  He was vulnerable against not so I believed him.  This was passed back to me.  Here is my excuse.  I was pretty sure he had about 9 nearly solid diamonds for this so even though I had none my partner probably didn’t have a fistful.  Thus, we probably had some sort of fit.  I decided to take a shot.  Either we could make something, he could make five diamonds and we weren’t going for too big a number or well if it was bad it wouldn’t be really really bad.  So I bid 5 .  This was doubled and I was happy that partner pulled to 6.  There was the routine double.  The diamond ace was led and this awesome dummy came down.

54
862
K96 
AK1094

 

Well maybe not that awesome but good enough that it wasn’t going to be a slaughter.  What was –300 between friends.  But since 5 looked a bit rocky that was not going to be a good score especially when the clubs split 1-1.  I finessed the spade and the ace won and a diamond came back.  I won this one throwing a heart.  Here was the position

 

	5 862 9  K1094
	K107 A10 void  QJ86

What were my chances?  Well the simplest one is the simple squeeze on East in hearts and spades and as I thought about it, that wasn’t so unlikely.  West had 8 or 9 diamonds a club and at least one spade.  If he held only one heart I didn’t care which and no more than 3 spades then Eat would be squeezed. So I repeated the spade finesse cashed the top spade and ran clubs and YES West had the stiff K and 6 doubled romped home.  The squeeze was easy I know.  I just had to watch for the top spades and when they didn’t all disappear play for the hearts to come in.  It would have been on about page 5 of Love Bridge Squeeze Complete, New Edition.  But it still felt nice and my mentee loved it too.  Here was the whole hand

	54 862 K96  AK1094
A8 K AQJ1087532 2		Q9632 QJ76543 4  7
	KJ107 A109 void  QJ8653

By the way I just heard that the new edition of Clyde E. Love (as updated by Linda Lee and Julian Pottage) was nominated for the ABTA Book of the Year Award.  I can’t believe it really.  I never expected to have a book to be part of the author team on a book nominated for a prestigious award.  Of course for Julian it is old hat.  More about this another time.