| North | ||
| ♠ A 10 2 | ||
| ♥ A K 8 7 5 | ||
| ♦ J 9 8 | ||
| ♣ 10 2 | ||
| South | ||
| ♠ K Q J 9 8 7 | ||
| ♥ 10 2 | ||
| ♦ 6 5 3 | ||
| ♣ A Q |
You crawl into 4♠ after partner responds 2♥ to your opening 1♠ bid and raises your 2♠ rebid to 4♠.
West leads the king, queen, and ♦10 to East’s ace and East exits with the expected low club. Plan the play.
The club finesse is a 50-50 shot. However setting up the hearts for a club discard, needing no worse than 4-2 hearts, logs in at 84%.
Warning: When setting up a long suit, side entries to the hand with the long suit must be conserved. And there must be enough of them. If hearts are a likely 4-2, you will need two dummy entries outside of hearts to set up the suit: one to get over there to ruff the fourth round of hearts and one to get back to dummy to use the established fifth heart after drawing trumps. If you don’t have the necessary entries, forget long suit establishment and try something else.
Win the ♣A, cash a high spade from your hand, leaving two trump entries in dummy, and then the ♥AK and ruff a heart. Assuming 4-2 hearts, return to dummy with a spade, ruff a heart high setting up the fifth heart, and cross back to a spade to discard the ♣Q on the long heart. Beautiful.
| ♠ A 10 2 | ||
| ♥ A K 8 7 5 | ||
| ♦ J 9 8 | ||
| ♣ 10 2 | ||
| ♠ 6 4 | ♠ 5 3 | |
| ♥ Q J 6 4 3 | ♥ 9 | |
| ♦ K Q 10 | ♦ A 7 4 2 | |
| ♣ J 9 8 | ♣ K 7 6 5 4 3 | |
| ♠ K Q J 9 8 7 | ||
| ♥ 10 2 | ||
| ♦ 6 5 3 | ||
| ♣ A Q |
What happened? East ruffed the second heart and cashed the ♣K, down two and the club finesse was onside all along! Why am I so mean to you? I wasn’t. You played the hand properly. Only someone who misplayed the hand badly and took the club finesse made it. For shame if you made this hand!
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