Only the Expert Goes Down


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

You have two 5-1 side suits. Which one do you want to ruff out and establish? I would think this was a no-brainer. Spades beckon for two reasons. The first is that you have the top two honors in spades and thus need only ruff twice if the suit is splitting 4-3, while diamonds, with only one top honor, would require three ruffs to establish. And secondly, you'd be ruffing spades in the short trump hand, pretty much preserving that long 6-card holding in the closed. Then it occurred to me that one can test them sequentially without harm, thus: At trick two, ace of diamonds, ruff a diamond, king of spades, ruff a diamond. Here you get the news that diamonds aren't splitting 4-3, so you switch. Do you still have time? Yes you do.
Ruff a spade, lead a trump. The best East can do is go up and lead another. So you ruff another spade and you've got your necessary 4-3 split. You have no more trump in dummy, and only two in the closed hand (two leads and two diamond ruffs). And that's plenty. Now ruff anything, cash the A of spades, dropping their last and claim.
One declarer played the hand out as a crossruff. I confess I didn't see that at first, largely because it looked so obvious that you'd do quite well testing spades for a 4-3 split. And I wondered why this declarer was ruffing out his established 9 of spades, when he only needed to draw trump and play the 9. Then I saw that the crossruff wasn't such a bad idea at that. Let's see. We have 4 side-suit winners, meaning we need 8 trump winners. And do we have them? Yes, it would seem (with only a minor qualification). We have ten trump. East can overruff a spade and lead a trump, but that leaves us with 8. You subtract one for every overruff and one for every trump lead when you have trump in both hands. We start with 10 trump, so even an overruff and trump lead would only cut us to 8 trump winners, which is all we want. Please note the difference between that eventuality and two quick trump leads (which the defense could effect on opening lead, but no later). That cuts you down to 7 trump winners, max (losing one for each trump lead and one for the A), which is not enough for your contract. But that wasn't the opening lead, and declarer was able to bring home 12 winners by the crossruff.
The minor qualification referred to above is that you've got to ruff twice with low cards in the closed hand, but if you ruff one diamond and one heart, it's unlikely that either will be overruffed. When the second low trump holds, you've got a guaranteed contract. The only card that can beat a ruff is the ace, which you've got to lose whatever you do, and we've already counted to determine that that overruff and a club return can't cut you down far enough to harm you.
Oh, and one more thing. You must cash out your side suit winners first. Please note the difference between cashing the A of spades when going for a crossruff and when going to establish the spade suit in the closed hand. On a crossruff, if you don't cash the A & K of spades early, you might find a spade honor ruffed with the 5, and that would hurt. On the other hand -- and this is a very common mistake -- if you're going to establish the spade suit, you don't want to cash the ace! Save it. You don't want to cash it and run the suit out to the fourth round. You only want to cash the K of necessity and then ruff twice, and that's enough. If everybody followed, you would know that there was one more spade out, but as soon as trump were drawn, you would be able to drop that last one with the A and then cash the 9.
So it's not a difficult hand. I'm not talking about any advanced concepts here. Just counting up to twelve, if you wanna do the crossruff. Just noting everyone following to the third round of spades if you go to set up that suit. Just switching to spades if you first attack diamonds and find they don't work. Everything works. So how come this expert went down? The only one to do so. (In truth, he lists himself as "Exp/Adv")
Well, he went down, I think I might say, because his mind wasn't focussed. He just had no feel for the winners available nor what he wanted to set up or do. Here's how it was played. Heart opening lead, K of clubs to the A. A club return would have put the kibosh on the crossruff, but this declarer didn't notice that potential anyway. It was a heart that was returned, ruffed, of course, and now: Ace of diamonds, ruff a diamond, K of spades, Q of clubs. Queen of clubs! That's the killer in a couple of ways. First, why on earth is he going to the A of diamonds and ruffing a diamond if he doesn't intend to set up the suit? And look what happens if he'll just ruff the third round of diamonds. Had diamonds been splitting 4-3, he would then have a guaranteed contract. In that event, he could go back to the Q of clubs, which serves both to draw the last trump and give him an entry for another diamond ruff. He would then cash the A of spades, sluffing a heart, ruff a spade, cash the last diamond, sluffing a spade and ruff the last heart. The closed hand would thus ruff 3 diamonds and 1 heart.
Well, no, diamonds didn't split 4-3. But if only declarer (who actually then led a third diamond for ruffing, showing that his mind was fixed on that diamond suit after all) had ruffed before cashing that Q of trump, he would have seen that ruffing out the diamonds won't work, which is very valuable information -- and that he could finish out the hand on a high crossruff! -- subject only to the A of spades holding, which it would have, even if East has sluffed a spade on the third round of diamonds, which he didn't do. Declarer doesn't need to pick up that 5 of trump since he has no trump lower at that point. He merely ruffs a spade, ruffs anything, ruffs a spade, ruffs anything, ruffs a spade and the closed hand has only high trump.