Entries, Again

	K
	A Q 8
	A K 8 4 2
	A 7 4 2
J 7 5		9 8 6 2
7 6 5		J 4 3 2
10 9 5		Q 7 6
J 8 6 3		10 5
	A Q 10 4 3
	K 10 9
	J 3		Opening lead: 7 of hearts
	K Q 9		Contract: 7 no trump

Declarer let the opening lead ride around to his king, cashed the Q, then K of clubs, and . . . . and . . . . and do you see what I see? Declarer has exactly three entries to the closed hand, outside of overtaking the K of spades, which he cannot afford to do, and he absolutely rushed to cash out those entries. Not one of those entries had to be cashed. And this is a penchant I see demonstrated time and time again. Not just wiping out communication, not carelessly doing it in mid-hand where a tough choice has to be made, but doing it at one's first opportunity to do so. I'll never understand why this is so common.

Now declarer cannot make the hand, an awfully lucky grand slam potential wiped out because of a hurry to wipe out his communication. This hand could as easily have been entered under Communication, Housekeeping, and Development. They do tend to overlap, I admit. For they all point in the same direction: set up your winners, test the uncertainties before cashing out top winners for no purpose whatsoever.

You get an awfully lucky break in spades: J low, low! The J falls in 3 leads, the 9 on the fourth! The J of spades could fall too short, which is to say the other defender would control the 5th round of the suit with the 9. And you've gotta be ready to cash out on that luck, both because your peers will be doing so and to make up for the times your rather aggressive bidding doesn't pan out. And there's no reason not to. I mean, it's not as if another line offered comparable chances of 13 tricks.

So: since the spade suit is key to the making of this hand, or possibly the spades and clubs combined, one would think the first order of business would be not just the unblocking of the spade suit, but testing it out to the third round to see how the defensive spades are falling. That's not hindsight, for heaven's sake. That's going after the cards that might make the hand. And as for clubs, they'll wait.

Hence: with two top hearts in dummy and one in the closed hand, one would think your inclination, even before you got your mind in gear, would be to win that opening lead in dummy and thus have an entry to each hand in hearts alone. Oh, there'll be hands where you can see at a glance that you're going to need all the entries to dummy you can find, in which case you wouldn't follow any "rule" to win in the hand with two honors. But here it should be clear at a glance that you're not hurting for entries to dummy.

So I would take the opening lead in dummy, cash the K of spades, come to the closed hand with a club (or heart), and cash the A Q of spades. On this hand it's all over. But I want to show how you keep all possibilities open. If the J of spades doesn't fall, you cash the A of diamonds. If the Q falls, you're still alive, and need only 3-3 clubs and need something else very much, which is communication. [Years later: I spent too much time on the possibility of the Q of diamonds falling singleton, which is too improbable to dwell on. Still, stranger things have happened. That would give you three top cards in every suit for 12. The 13th could come from the long club, or a club-spade squeeze if the same hand holds the long clubs and long spades. In any event, you're gonna need a lot more communication on that happenstance.] You come to the J of diamonds, go back to dummy with the Q of hearts, cash the A of diamonds, sluffing a spade, finish off hearts, come to the closed hand with a club, and will have your contract on either 3-3 clubs or the squeeze suggested.

If the J of spades falls too short, it's roughly the same situation, except that now the defense controls the 5th round instead of the fourth. You finish off the diamonds and hearts, come to the closed hand with the clubs and again you have your contract on either 3-3 clubs or a black-suit squeeze. [We're still on the stiff Q of diamonds!] If the J of spades lies in the long hand and you don't get that improbable stiff Q of diamonds, you're dead in the water. No squeeze. No 3-3 break in clubs would help. And so it goes.

But wait! Couldn't there be a 3-suit squeeze against West, who holds a singleton heart on 4-1-4-4 distribution, including the J of spades. He discards clubs on heart leads, giving up the suit, and now declarer runs his clubs, discarding a spade, and comes to the closed hand at trick 10 on that now all-important K of hearts (so willfully played at trick one), so that the closed hand holds two diamonds and a spade opposite A K 8 in diamonds (East holding only two of 'em) and West can't guard both that last spade and the third round of diamonds.

Oh, this simple hand is getting us into la-la land. I hope it is clear that stiff queens and squeezes aside, for those of us who can't always get our mind in gear for all these possibilities in the moderate haste of play, it's a simple hand that requires only keeping your entries and communication intact insofar as you can. Win the heart opening lead in dummy, to which you have plenty of entries, unblock the K of spades and test the suit that so obviously just might hold the key to 13 tricks. If the suit doesn't fall right, take it from there. The hand that a soi-disant advanced player butchered because of unnecessarily cashing out entries has become too speculative to pursue further.