I spend a fair amount of time trying to stop you guys from being so afraid of playing in Moysian fits. It's true, however, that they are not
always the right answer. Take this hand that Brian Meadows and I played (as EW) today against a decent Precision pair - Matt Smith (sophrosyne) and John Schiffeler (JohnWmS) - who might be interested in switching to OCP.
All Vulnerable, Dealer North (positions changed for ease of reference)
You are South and hold
Q
A1043
K752
A842
Partner opens 1
and the bidding proceeds
1
- 1
2
- 3
3
- ??
I think it's clear here that 3
is a forward-going move by Partner with only 3-card Hearts. If they had 4-card Hearts, they'd be agreeing Hearts immediately with 2
rather than showing the Diamonds (however good they are), so the initial question here is whether you bid 4
and accept the probable Moysian fit, or 5
and go for the known 9+ card fit.
At the table John bid 4
, mistakenly thinking Matt might still have 4-card support, but a strong Diamond suit. Brian led the 10
and Dummy went down with
10
led
North J98
K87
AQJ1096
6
South Q
A1043
K752
A842
Easy to see that you've missed the best contract of 5
, which is absolutely solid, losing just a Spade and a Heart.
How do you plan the play in 4
, however? I suspect John panicked a little when he saw only 3-card
support and proceeded to try to cross-ruff the Black suits, interrupted only by one round of trumps when Brian got in with the A
. By trick 7, therefore, Declarer had won 6 tricks and still had a Diamond and the Ace of trumps to come, but that was all he could manage (and so was -2).
Cross-ruffing is sometimes the answer, but when you have a long suit you can run, especially a 10-card fit, it's
much better to (1) draw trumps and then run your suit, or (2)
partially draw trumps and then use your long suit as trumps in order to retain trump control. The absolute
last thing you want to do is to start ruffing
early before you're in a position to continue.
Option (2) doesn't really work here, because you're going to lose a Spade, 2 Hearts and two Clubs, because if you take 2 rounds of Hearts and then play on Diamonds, Opps will still have 1 Heart left when Dummy runs of Hearts and is no longer to ruff your Club losers. Better on this hand to hope for 3-3 Hearts (or perhaps even
Hx with West) and to
duck a Heart at trick 2, This leaves a small Heart in Dummy to cope with a Club continuation, and you can ruff a second Spade in hand if Opps switch to Spades. Now as the cards lie Opps are powerless, because you can mop up the remaining Hearts and run all of the Diamonds.
The EW cards:
West East A107
K65432
Q96
J52
43
8
KJ1073
Q95
If you have a 10-card fit in a side-suit a cross-ruff is almost always doomed to failure, because, as here, you're inevitably going to run out of things to ruff and by this point you've completely lost any semblance of trump control.