In the play of the hand, one of declarer's goals is to avoid having to guess the location of missing honours. Sometimes, it's possible to force the defenders to assist via what's known as an endplay.
On this board, a fairly normal auction might have been 2♥-Pass-4♥-All Pass. While East-West have a cheap non-vulnerable sacrifice available in diamonds, they are unlikely to find it.
As declarer in 4♥, taking 10 tricks is child’s play if West leads a spade or a club, which happened at half the tables on the day this deal turned up at the club. However, what if West finds a diamond lead? There are no losers in trumps and only one in diamonds, but there are potentially 2 losers in clubs, as well as a spade loser if declarer doesn’t manage to find the queen – that would mean the contract would go one down.
The problem can be solved by making the defenders play the spade suit for you! Ruff the diamond continuation, draw two rounds of trumps finishing in dummy, then ruff the last diamond in hand. This eliminates diamonds from both hands. Now when you play a club to the ace and a club back, the bad news is that no king appears on your right and your queen of clubs doesn’t survive. The good news, though, is that while East-West can cash one more club trick, whoever wins the second club trick is stuck. The opponent on play must either lead a spade for you, ensuring a successful finesse, or else provide a ruff-and-discard so that you can dispose of your spade loser.
Every time you have enough trumps between your hand and dummy, you should try to avoid taking a finesse in one suit if you can ruff out another and exit in a third while exhausting that suit.
This “elimination and throw-in” endplay is not that difficult to achieve and saves a lot of guessing!
Rakesh Kumar
The Southern Highlands Bridge Club runs three duplicate sessions every week (Mon 1:00 pm, Wed 6:30 pm, Sat 1:00 pm) at the East Bowral Community Centre. Highlands players and visitors welcome!
For more information: shbc.bridgeaustralia.org
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