No Trump Slams --III

K Q 9 8 6 5 3
A Q
A 5
5 4
A
K J 10 8 6 4
-----
A Q J 8 7 5

This hand created quite a fuss at a Swiss teams event. One team bid 7 hearts and went down, while the other bid 6 spades and made an overtrick. But not even the teammates of the 6 spade bidders were happy. They wanted to know why their teammates weren't in seven! Bridge players are like that.
And the curious thing about the recriminations was that no one even mentioned the best contract of them all: 7 no trump! (played from the South hand). Well, it's there. Look at it. You'll make 7 no whenever you make 7 spades, and sometimes when you can't. Look at the hand. You can't make 7 spades if either major suit breaks 4-1. It's not really all that safe a contract -- until you know spades break 3-2 and you didn't get a heart opening lead. (A look at the scoring system tell us that not-vulnerable, the grand slam would have brought in 3 IMPs more than the little slam! I think it's pretty nervy to jump on a partner for 3 IMPs for not bidding a grand slam you now know would make and particularly when one doesn't even recognize the far safer contract of 7 no.)
At seven no, you don't have to worry about whether that was a singleton heart lead or not. You unblock the ace of spades, get to dummy with the other heart honor, continue spades and sacre bleu! One of those s.o.b.'s shows out. Not to worry (yet). Counting our winners, we find we have 3 spades, 6 hearts, a diamond and . . . well, there's that club hook. It might not be on, but would you rather tamely submit to down one? What's worse, if you got a heart opening lead, you'll make only on an on-sides king doubleton (I don't think you'd want to take the finesse before unblocking the spades and testing the split). But bear in mind, this is an alternative line only if spades break badly, at which point you would have had zero chance in 7 spades. And this is in addition to having no problem with a 4-1 heart break.
An interesting hand, eh? It is to me. And indeed, it also illustrates my fourth and last reason for the frequent advisability of no trump slams:
(4) When your dominant suit breaks badly, you can not too rarely just abandon it and find your winners elsewhere. So this hand illustrates three possible advantages of no trump, that you won't be foiled by a ruff, that you can cash your top cards when you come to them and not be bamboozled by a lack of entries after trump are drawn and that if your dominant suit breaks badly, you might be able to find your tricks elsewhere, which is not possible if you've named that suit trump. If only this had been a matchpoint event, there would have been a clean sweep of illustrating all four points in this hand.

In part two, I gave this hand which I might reproduce to illustrate this point here.

K 5
9 7 5
6 5
A K Q 8 6 3
A Q J 8 6 4
A K
A 8 7 4
7

I said earlier that in no trump, declarer could cash his three club winners immediately if he got a club opening lead, but in a spade contract, he would have to test at least one of them before all trump were out. This hand also illustrates that if spades break badly -- an unlikely 5-0 split, to be sure -- declarer would at least have a chance of getting his winners on a 3-3 club split. Here's a more likely scenario, where a finesse would do it:

K 7
6 5
A K Q 8 7 6 2
Q J
A Q 5
A K J 10 4
3
K 10 8 6

This hand would be a piece of cake if diamonds split evenly. And if they split 4-1? Well, don't take a third round, of course, since the ace of clubs might lie with the long diamonds. First, let's stop to count our winners: Three spades, 3 diamonds probably (if we didn't chew up entries to dummy), three clubs and two hearts. Just missed. We'll have to take the heart hook. If we're down, we're down, but at least it's better than being tied to the diamond suit where we'd necessarily be down on the 4-1 split. If it holds, looks as if we're cold for three tricks in each suit!

Here is a near miss:

A 9 7 5
A K Q 10 8 7
7
K 5
Q J 10 2 ------
J 8 7 6 5 4
6 5 4 Q J 10 9 8 3 2 West North East South
A 6 5 9 4 2 1 P 1
K 8 6 4 3 P 3 P 4 NT
7 P 5 P 6
A K Dbl P P 6 NT
Q J 10 8 4 Dbl All pass

West made a very, very ill-advised double of six spades for an extra several hundred points, risking giving up over a thousand. (I didn't jot down the vulnerability, but the point is the same in either case.) Declarer was shrewd enough to recognize what the double meant and immediately ran to 6 no which West, nothing daunted, decided to double also. Early in the hand, declarer led his singleton heart, paused...and finally went up. Whew! (I was an innocent participant sitting East.)
Further, and I didn't recognize this until typing it up almost twenty years later, this normally shrewd declarer wasn't shrewd enough to see that he had a squeeze against my partner. This would work whether or not declarer had cashed the A K Q of hearts and it would work if declarer got two spade leads on West's two opportunities to lead (but not both two spade leads and cashing out three hearts early, of course, since you need one entry to dummy). Without spade leads, fr'instance, declarer would get down to K 8 6 in spades in the closed hand, A 9 in dummy along with the 10 of hearts, and West would have been squeezed at this point. If he hasn't thrown the jack of hearts, then he can hold only two spades.
So the hand shows in spades how in no trump you can sometimes abandon (late rounds of) your dominant suit and find your winners elsewhere, as this defender came close to guiding declarer into doing.

Of course it's not easy to decide what to do in actual play. Or at least not always easy, though there are bound to be a few fairly obvious cases where you're just throwing away points not to be in no trump. I started out with cases that call for naming a suit as trump, so I'm not trying to "sell" no trump slams. I'm only saying that they often work better than a suit slam and for more reasons than "just ten points" as my RHO scornfully referred to my thought of considering a no trump slam. That's in fact about the last reason. There are too many points involved even in matchpoints to make that a primary consideration. If either trump or no trump looks significantly safer than the other, then surely that's the one you want to go for.
I take this hand to epitomize the touch-and-go nature of deciding:

7 5
K J 10 6 4
A 9 6 4
A 9
9 8 6 4 2
Q 7 5 9 8 3 2
Q 10 2 J 8 7 3
K 10 5 3 J 7 2 West North East Sout
A K Q J 10 3 1 P 2
A P 3 P 4 NT
K 5 P 5 P 5 NT
Q 8 6 4 P 6 P 6 NT All pass

Let's look at the hand from South's viewpoint for a moment. Blackwood isn't generally advisable with a queen-high suit, but South figured it was better than nothing. And finding the partnership had all the aces, asked for kings and found they were missing one.
At this point, South can count on 6 spades, 2 diamonds, and two aces for ten, plus a king. If the king is the club king, that makes the queen good for 12, and if the heart, that makes 11 with every suit amply stopped and any number of chances for that 12th trick. No trump seemed an eminently viable choice. (Every suit amply stopped? Well, with a stiff ace of clubs in dummy, on a club lead, South is going to wish he'd settled in spades, but nobody ever said you're going to get certainty. On the other hand, if the club ace isn't bare, a club lead would establiish declarer's 12th trick.)
As the cards lie, either contract could be made -- but six spades was perhaps a little safer. This declarer didn't get the club lead he was hoping for, but he got one that worked just as well, which was a spade. Now it was no trick to cash his ace of hearts and go to dummy with a diamond to develop his 12th winner by way of the J 10 of hearts.
The potentially crushing lead would have been a diamond. Now after unblocking the hearts, South has to unstop one of the minors to get to dummy for his hearts. Analysis shows that South does have a squeeze, throw-in for a 12th winner, but it's far from certain that it would have been found in actual play. After 8 tricks, the position is this:

----
K J
A
A 7
------
Q 5 immaterial
7
K 7
------
------
6
Q 8 6 4

South enters dummy with the ace of diamonds and can now throw West in by cashing the top honor and continuing the suit in either hearts or clubs, But it requires some fancy card-reading, and if West should happen to save 2 diamonds, blanking an honor in anticipation of the throw-in, he could set the contract if declarer guesses wrong.
In spades, a diamond lead wouldn't hurt. Declarer would draw trump, unblock the heart ace, and now he wouldn't be unstopping the diamonds on a lead to the ace. He would then develop his twelfth winner with impunity, as the no trump bidder did in actual play. But before you say, "Ha! That illustrates what I've always thought that the trump contract is safer," let me point out first, that's this hand, and after we've seen how the cards lie that we can say spades are safer.
It doesn't take much imagination to picture a layout where the trump contract is not safer. How would you like a club lead in a spade contract. Is that a singleton? Dare you duck it? Obviously if it's a singleton, ducking it would be fatal, but if it's not a singleton, going up could blow your last chance to make the contract. So there are layouts and layouts, favorable leads and not so favorable leads. Maybe the spade contract is a tad safer, by and large. I'm not real sure. But bearing in mind that even with the most unfavorable lead against 6 no, declarer can still make his contract if he reads the cards right, I would call this pretty close to a toss-up.