A tough hand to get Right

[OliverC]

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

Bidding
North     East     South     West
No          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)