Shoulda Been a Piece of Cake

	K J
	A 9 8 6 2
	A K 4
	A 7 4
8 5		7 6
J 7 4		K 10 3
Q J 9 6		7 3 2
K Q 10 2		9 8 6 5 3
	A Q 10 9 4 3 2
	Q 5
	10 8 5	Contract: 6 spades
	J	Opening lead: K of clubs

You win the opening lead with the ace and lead a small heart to the Q, and the rest is history. Obviously, there wouldn't be much to discuss about the hand if that were all one had to say: look toward your most powerful side suit! Always? Ah, ah, you're not going to trap me into saying always. No, siree. But usually. And declarers should certainly have been looking to the heart suit to save them from a diamond loser and yes, looking very early.

Two declarers set about immediately ruffing out the club suit! Evidently, they were both trying a strip-and-endplay, hoping the person taking their diamond loser holds the K of hearts and has no exit card outside of hearts! But this is not a good candidate for that type of play, not when you have only two trump in dummy, both used up in drawing trump. If the winner of the 3rd round of diamonds did have the K of hearts, he could simply lead any suit but hearts. Since declarer led clubs 3 times and diamonds the same number, declarer would have had to find a defender with no more than 3 cards in each of the minors and holding the king of hearts -- a long, long shot compared to simply finding East with the K. Not a good candidate.

[I don't know that that was on the mind of the declarers who were ruffing out clubs in the long, very long, trump holding, and I see that I didn't mention the trump holding (specifically). The throw-in on the third round of diamonds would also require that declarer had taken a round of trump and this defender started with no more than one trump! So you've got a very, very specific situation: The same hand has the K of hearts, no more than one trump and can't avoid winning the third round of diamonds! Yikes! I'll go with hearts being no worse than 4-2.]

[Of course it's very possible that these declarers thought they were picking up extra tricks by the ruffs, for I've seen that often enough. You might note that there's no substantial difference between ruffing those clubs in dummy and sluffing those clubs later on the long spades. I don't say this is always the case, not even when ruffing in the long hand, but that that is the case here.]

But before leaving the hand, and to explain why I put this under "Entries", I'd like to point out that you don't even need to find the K of hearts onsides, nor indeed, to find a 3-3 heart split on an off-sides king! Declarer had so danged many entries to dummy and needing only that 5th heart that he had a piece of cake and decided to turn it into a crumbling piece of bread. Hence, low heart at trick two, losing the Q to the K (let us say). Win any return, A of hearts, ruff a heart high (you've got all trump down to the 9), go to dummy, finish drawing trump, ruff the fourth round of hearts, and now you have an easy entry to dummy to cash the 5th heart, sluffing the diamond loser.