Perhaps Revisited



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

I would have sworn I'd just entered this hand and probably did, but I cannot find it now. Just a day or so after discussing it, I came across a few more printouts of declarer play and had some further thoughts on the hand and decided to write them up here. I will append them later if I come across the original. I pointed out how you'd need to trump hearts twice in dummy and hence couldn't afford to take three rounds of trump and then wonder what to do next.
The hand works pretty much like a crossruff, which I was reminded of in pointing out the crossruffing potential in Example 42. You count three top clubs, two top hearts and a top diamond for six, which means that for grand slam, you'll need 7 tricks in trump. And one obvious way to get 7 trump winners on a 5-4 holding is to ruff twice in the short hand -- provided you aren't wiping out honors need to draw the defense's trump in so doing. So one declarer who took the second round of trump with the J put himself in just that position. If he wanted to ruff hearts twice now, with only the K 10 left, then he was going to wipe out the ability to draw the 9.
Anyway, it's not so difficult to see how you're going to ruff hearts twice and set up a thirteenth winner: Opening lead won in dummy, the Q falling. Declarer cashes two rounds of hearts and ruffs a heart, noting when West shows out that a low ruff cannot be overruffed. But wait a minute: West sluffs off on the third round of hearts. Take note of his suit. You don't want to lead the suit he's shorting himself in, well, not too often. Cash two rounds of clubs, sluffing a diamond, cash the A of diamonds and ruff diamond, ruff a heart, cash another high trump, and . . . We've just got to get back to the closed hand one more time. What did West discard on the last two heart leads? If two diamonds, I'd come back with a club ruff, and the reverse with two club sluffs. And if he sluffed one of each? If he started with a 3-card minor, we can't ruff that suit low. I believe I'd be guided by his first sluff. I'd think he would have an interest in shorting that three-card suit and hence I'd try the other suit. We see that West didn't start with a three-card minor, and only if we tried the suit where he sluffed twice would we be in trouble. You have how many trump left in the closed hand? Just one, and with that, you draw West's last trump. Your only other card is the high heart.
It's not a classic case of a crossruff, in that you can draw a second round of trump and that you ruff every time in the closed hand with low trump. In fact, we're not going to cash the third club winner, for if we can ruff two rounds of trump and get to the closed hand to draw the last trump, our last heart will be a winner to replace that one. So, okay, it's not a true case. Yet it has the earmarks of a crossruff in that we count our side-suit winners (and could cash the third club winner if we're careful), and from that note how many trump tricks we need and see that we can effect them. And if it leads anyone to seeing how to play the hand, who cares what the exact terminology is?
And then another happy thought occurred to me, namely that this could easily be played as a dummy reversal. Let's see if we can take care of every card in dummy. We see that hearts are solid, and that we have three minor suit cards we'll have to ruff in the closed hand. We take the opening spade lead, cash the A of clubs and ruff a club, back with the ace of diamonds, cash another club to sluff a diamond, ruff a diamond, back with a trump to the K and ruff a diamond with the jack. How many trump do you have in the closed hand? The answer has to be zero, since you've led two rounds of trump and ruffed three times. Now we have to get back to dummy and it only remains that West isn't looking at a singleton heart, for we know he's the only one with trump left, and if he can ruff the third round, we have the tenace over him. Cash two hearts and when West follows, you're in clover. Ruff a heart as low as possible and cash the last trump.
This hand was played from both sides of the table, getting a spade lead (the stiff queen) in that circumstance also. Now when the short hand is the closed one, playing as above wouldn't be a dummy reversal, of course, but an attempt to make the closed hand good. However, you can be sure some would then play it as a dummy reversal, setting up the hearts! Which works also, fortunately. Well, I look at who went down, and only the declarer who went to the J of spades for his second round of trump did so. Now when he ruffed the Q of diamonds with the 8 of trump, he was overruffed for minus 15 IMP's while others in the grand were picking up 13.