HighSchoolOfGlasgowJuniors vs Aardfap

It's school exam season, which meant I only had two Juniors available for my team this week. Phil and I stepped in to be the other pair. In this match we had the pleasure of playing against Peter Edmond's Bearsden Improvers Club. Peter is also a former HSOG maths teacher (like Phil) so it was a true reunion.

I like Phil's style, as like me he is always on the lookout for a possible game and slam, and together we bid pretty aggressively. This produced some very good results, though this is not one of them:

On both tables East opened 4♥. This is definitely not my choice, as you might miss slam, or your partner may sacrifice when in fact you have lots of defence.

Phil had the big South hand and took the reasonable decision to double. He got to response he didn't want, 4♠, and had to pass.

In 4♠ I got the expected ♥A lead. How do you play it?

In fact the best option is to duck this trick, throwing a Club or Diamond from dummy. Then when East continues Hearts (as he surely would) you can ruff it, draw a couple of rounds of trumps with the Ace-King, finesse Clubs and run winners. The defence just gets that one Heart at the start, and two trumps. It needs a lucky layout in Clubs (and Spades 4-2 oddly) but works here.

It's an interesting deal in that the winning play relies on ducking, in a suit contract, which you don't see often.

This duck did not occur to me at the table. I was just trying for as many tricks as possible, and planned to ruff two Hearts in dummy. The problem with this is that each time you ruff a Heart you have no entry back to hand. I finished on 4♠-3. On the other table East-West pushed on to 5♥, which South gratefully doubled and beat by two tricks.

Despite the 14 IMP loss on this board, we scraped home to win the match 50-45.