On Board 10 I was faced with an absolute textbook hand. How do you play 3NT on the lead of the 6 of Hearts?
The first thing to note is that you don't have enough time to set up the Clubs. You have to lose the lead twice, which means they'll have knocked out your Ace-King of Hearts. You will then lose three Hearts and two Clubs.
If Hearts are 4-4 you are OK though. I therefore ducked the first Heart. When South followed with the 4 of Hearts on the secound round it looked like Hearts were 5-3 (at least). Over to Spades then. I unblocked the Diamonds (perhaps a mistake) and played a Spade to the Ace then a low Spade. I planned to duck this, but North popped up with the Jack. I can now establish a Spade trick by force, but never get to it, as I have no more entries to hand. So I had to duck this Spade. This so confused South he overtook with the ♠Q and I fortuitiously had nine tricks.
The best line in thie Spade suit in isolation is to play the Ace-King. This gains if anyone has honour-doubleton, and I'm always OK if they are 3-3. My line appeared to give benefits when Hearts are 4-4, but actually just messed up my entries.
On the other table my counterpart Mike McGinley got it right - just winning the fist Heart with the King and playing the top Spades.
Overall we lost the match 10-6, which for the team that's bottom of the league was quite a good result.
It looks like actually the best play in isolation, assuming you have the entries, is to play low to the 8, then if it loses run the 9. Vs playing off AK, This loses to QJxx QJx or QJ in N (18.4%), but it wins against QJxx in South, and also against QJxxx(x) in either hand (South shows out when you lead the 9 and you can still finesse the right way) (20.87%).
ReplyDeleteI think the problem here is that you don't have quite enough entries to do that (e.g. if you run the 9 on the second round of spades, you can't unblock both pointed suits), so Mike's play was probably right on the hand.