This was a tough hand that Eszter and I played yesterday. I'll show you all four hands:
Love All, Dealer North North SQ63
108765
85
97
West East 54
KJ2
KQJ3
42
K3
J102
KJ532
AQ1084
South 10987
A9
AQ9764
6
BiddingNorth East South WestNo 1
2
X
2
No No 3NT
All Pass
I'm not certain I would have found Eszter's 2
bid opposite a WJO, and it certainly affected the defence in a big way:
Eszter led the
8, which was covered by Dummy's 10. Looking at all 4 hands it's easy to see that the right defence is simply to duck (or cover the 10 with the Queen and then sit back and wait for a Heart lead or for Partner to win the Ace of Spades and fire another Diamond through). I was worried, though, that the !D8 might well be a singleton and she could easily be sat there with
KJxxxx, or
Q10xxxx
with something like the Ace of Spades. The 2
bid made it much more likely that she had reasonable 6-card Hearts and allowing Declarer to win trick 1 would potentially give Declarer the tempo.
In the end I decided that there was too much of a chance that
Declarer had the Ace of Spades, and that Eszter's values were mostly in Hearts (anything she had in Clubs could be picked up by Declarer in any case), so Declarer might possibly come to 9 tricks without touching the Hearts if I allowed him to win trick 1. That meant that the only chance for taking this contract off was to find Eszter with
KJxxxx and nothing else (so notionally too weak for a Weak 2 in Hearts), and that Declarer was chancing their arm with something like
AQxx,
Q10x,
Kxx,
KJx, perhaps relying on a
lead away from the AK.
After some thought, I went up with the
Ace at trick 1 and switched to Ace and another Heart, which was not a great success
. Possibly I ought to place Eszter with the Ace of Spades on the basis that Declarer is more likely to take a chance on the unbid Spade suit and to have a more rebust holding in Hearts than I was giving them credit for. As I've said before, if defence was always easy, 80% of contracts would be going off
This was certainly one I got wrong. (You can add that to your list, Roger LOL)