Another Tenuous Grand


Q 3
A K J 6
K 6 3 2
Q 3 2
5 2 10 9 8
Q 9 8 7 4 3 2 5
Q J 9 5 4
J 9 K 10 7 6 5 4
A K J 7 6 4
10
A 10 8 7
A 8

Here is another tenuous grand slam that brought both success on a very lucky lie of the diamonds and failure on, well, that same lie of the diamonds. Though this slam can be made on sterling play all around, only 2 out of 6 grand slammers brought their contract home, while yesterday's beatable grand slam showed just under half (5 out of 11) brought their contract home. For what it's worth, the beatable grand slam brought 11 acolytes ouf of 21 pairs, or more than half, while the (luckily) makable grand slam only attracted 6 out of 41! And so it goes.
Those who tried the Law of Restricted Choice unsuccessfully can't be criticized. Hey, it works in theory and always works in newspapers. Except perhaps one declarer can be criticized for this reason: If diamonds were really were 4-1, that Law doesn't help him anyway. He can finesse the 10 of diamonds successfully, but he had no more entries to dummy and hence would have had to lose a trick to the jack later. His only hope was to drop the Q J doubleton. This declarer, incidentally, got the queen of diamonds opening lead. And there's gotta be a difference between a queen on opening lead, and a queen second hand on a lead toward the king and a queen dropping under the king fourth hand. I don't think that Law would apply to a freely chosen lead, nor to a queen, second hand, since it's a common practice to split honors holding Q J low. [I suppose it could be argued that (for all declarer knows) West began the hand with a Q doubleton, East then holding one guard to the J on the second round lead toward the A 10. Okay. Yes, the Q from Q doubleton would be a costly lead under those circumstances, but not unheard of.]
And the others? Did they preserve an extra entry? No, it was more a matter of the heart suit. If you have three heart winners, you can pitch two cards in the closed hand, one a club, the other a diamond, and now the finesse of the 10 would be the slam-making play if only that other honor were where it "should" be.
Now of 4 who were down in 7 spades, one played it from the North hand and got a heart lead that very handily gave him two heart pitches, and another's 10 of hearts was covered, for three his way. I would normally call that a bad cover, a very ill-advised cover. West can see that declarer can't have more than two hearts and is unlikely to finesse in a grand slam when he has the top two hearts opposite at most two hearts. But on a second look, the cover is what gives declarer a choice in diamonds, which choice led to his undoing.
What was most amazing was the number of people who went down in six spades. I printed out three of them and found two had made the same mistake, while the third's mistake was diametrically opposite to the first two.
Opening lead (for one) was the 9 of hearts. Declarer went up, came to the ace of spades, back to the queen, king of hearts -- ruffed! Why, why, why? A few days back, I mentioned that a 5-1 split wasn't rare, and especially when a defender leads that suit against a suit slam. And I said it wasn't hindsight to say one should suspect that the 3 was a singleton. I might have been more forceful and said that in a suit slam, any lead must be viewed as possibly harboring a singleton.
I also said that not only are 9-card suits rare in one hand, but 9-card suits without a bid from the opposition must be virtually unheard of. Here it was only a 7-1 split that was at issue, and one defender did bid the suit, so that should have been warning enough. On the second hand where a declarer also let his king of hearts get ruffed, there was no bid from the opposition. So that might tell you something about the danger of a singleton, even with 8 cards out and no bid in the suit.
In any event, there was absolutely no reason whatever for allowing that second round of hearts to be ruffed since declarer didn't need to take it until after he'd drawn all trump from the opposition. Had he no outside entries, say the king of diamonds was with the ace in the closed hand, then it would simply have been bad luck to get a heart lead. You do your best in drawing two rounds of trump, the most you can draw and be in dummy for that heart pitch. Unfortunately, the hand now void in hearts is the one with 3 trump, and declarer couldn't discard that club loser without cost. That might have been the case. But here there is no fathomable reason why declarer doesn't simply run his opponents out of trump, then go to dummy with a diamond for a second heart trick, discarding a club, and now it's only a matter of whether he finesses the 10 of diamonds (he too would have no more entries to dummy and cannot gain on that finesse) or drops the jack for an overtrick. [Whoops! Correction: in little slam, declarer has every reason to take that finesse on the second round of diamonds, for either the 10 wins, or diamonds are splitting 3-2, guaranteeing his contract either way.]
The third declarer to go down in six spades took the opposite tack of leading all his spades. Like one of the grand slammers, he too had gotten the queen of diamonds opening lead and could have recovered from the folly of running himself out of trump if he'd dropped the jack, and he too, having cashed two heart winners, sluffing a club, had no way of picking up the jack if that queen was stiff, now finessed into the jack and suffered the ignominy of losing a trick to the queen of hearts! before West had to surrender the lead with a club to the ace.
I won't presume to say it was an easily makable grand slam, of course. But I can certainly say it was an easily makable little slam with no excuse for blowing it.

I would have been comfortable in little slam in each of these last two hands, yes, even the one where the grand can be made against any defence. One grand requires a defensive error, the other a very lucky set-up in diamonds plus a right guess, indeed a right guess that goes contrary to conventional wisdom. And I do confess that overbidding a perfectly reasonable little slam to grand makes me wince more than any other mischoice in bidding. So many points are being thrown away.
It's difficult to compare the two hands vis-à-vis bidding grand both times vs. little. Obviously, if you made both grands, you'd be way ahead of me and if you missed both I'd be way ahead, and if you made one, going down in the other? One was scored in matchpoints and the other in IMP's, so I can't make any reasonable comparisons there. Still, I think if you keep your eyes peeled, you'll find more thrown away by overbidding a very fine little slam than underbidding a makable grand. Look at the results.

When this web page was first set up, I had no category on Getting Trump Out nor on Finessing. After all, these plays are too elementary and obvious for discussion, are they not? I'm certain I was hectored to get my trump out on the first evening I played bridge. Though I have no recollection of learning what a finesse is, I'm sure it must have been fairly early in my bridge education. So I didn't think of establishing those two categories. But I began to see a disturbing number of fine contracts blown for a failure in one of those two obvious plays.
Now, of course neither one is an absolute. You certainly don't always want to start drawing trump at your first opportunity and you don't want to take every finesse available. We all know that, and columnists who exclaim that they're exposing the dumbbells who offer rigid rules get a little tedious, since I don't know whose these alleged yo-yo's positing rigid rules are. Of course each hand is a challenge, and you've got to decide on when to draw trump if in a suit contract, and which finesses to take.
But I believe I can say that in each case, your natural inclination should be toward the usual practice and that this should be resisted only for positive reasons. If you put off drawing trump or decline to take a finesse, you should be able to tell your partner, "I felt I couldn't draw trump yet because . . . " and the same with declining a finesse.
Here in the last few days, I've shown how some perfectly good contracts were blown because declarers eschewed natural finesses, and here two people blew a little slam by failing to draw all trump when there wasn't the faintest reason to hold off that third round. So they keep recurring, time and time again, the blown contract for failure to draw trump or for failure to take a natural finesse. They keep recurring.