Occasionally a hand comes along where you get everything right, which can be very satisfying, especially when OCP has got you to a reasonable contract when a third of the tables are passing the hand out. You play to give yourself every chance just to make a contract that isn't totally straightforward, but end up making overtricks because some or all of what you played for actually came about. This was a simple hand I played with Eszter yesterday. At Green vs Red you are playing in 1NT:
North 
KQ84
QJ
Q875
Q63
South 1032
A654
A62
K102
Playing OCP you opened 1NT 2nd-in hand and everyone passed. West leads the 3
. How do you assess your chances?
.
.
.
Although you have 23 HCP between the two hands and 1NT ought to be fairly straightforward, your lack of intermediates is a worry here. You can count on 1 Spade, 2 Hearts, a Diamond and a Club, but need to engineer two more tricks from somewhere. You can play the Queen of Diamonds at trick 1, but that's putting all of your eggs in one basket, and if West has the King, you will always get a second Diamond trick. You play small from Dummy therefore and East inserts the 9, taken by your Ace. What now?
You need to try to make something of the Spades, because there are too many intermediates missing in the Diamonds, and you're never going to get rich in Clubs or Hearts, so at trick 2 I led the 10 of Spades, playing for West to have the 9. West covered my 10 with the Jack and Dummy's Queen was taken by East's Ace. East switched back to the 10
. West erred badly by winning this trick with the King rather than letting the 10 ride and leaving themselves with 2 Diamond winners. He then led a Heart and I took East's King with my Ace.
Re-assess!: Two tricks so far. It looks fairly certain that West started with
KJxx and the play in the suit has set up a 3rd-round
finesse against their Jack. I've therefore got a Spade, a second Heart, and 2 Diamonds to look forward to, and cannot be denied a Club, so the contract seems secure. Sticking to my original plan, I now finessed the 8 of Spades, which held the trick (Yeehah!), and then tried a Club to my 10, which lost to West's Jack (You can't have everything in life and 10 tricks on these cards would be preposterous). West continued with a second Club to Dummy's Queen and East's Ace and East continued with a 3rd Club to my King.
Re-assess!: 4 tricks now, but I'm well in control. The
finesse against West's Jack succeeds, and the Spades were 3-3 so I was able to swiftly wrap up the rest for 9 tricks and a joint "top" of 3½ IMPs.
Brilliant play? No, not really. You can only play as well as Opps allow you on many occasions. Here an initial Heart lead might have left me struggling to find my 7th trick before EW got their 7th. Similarly, West rising with the King of Diamonds on the second round of the suit was a serious mistake, because it exposed their Jack. What I got right here was to realise after trick 1 that I had to try to make something of the Spades, and just playing a small Spade towards Dummy is an "all or nothing" play for West to have the Ace. Leading the 10 encouraged West to cover with their Jack and now when they turned up with the 9 and the suit is split 3-3, I've ended up with 3 tricks in the suit rather than 1 or 2.
The other thing is to do with
developing tricks before you cash quick tricks elsewhere. I could have continued Spades immediately after finessing the 8, but that puts a tiny bit of pressure on me to find a discard (
easy enough), but also it doesn't give Opps the opportunity to mistakenly discard a Spade, which would have assured me of the 3rd Spade trick whatever the position was. I ended up taking the last 5 tricks having spent the time developing those 5 tricks and getting rid of Opps' winners that were in my way. The other thing about cashing winners is that it can compromise transport between the two hands when you might be able to use those entries back and forth later on.
On the scorecard, the hand was inevitably passed out at several tables. Several pairs were going off in 2NT or even 1NT (or 2
or 2
), but the biggest block were in 1NT making exactly or with 1 overtrick only. Only one other pair gained 9 tricks in No Trumps
