What Does a Winner Look Like?

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

What does a winner look like? I once considered a separate category for this question. After all, you can't count winners (or losers) if you don't know what a winner looks like, and not too rarely, that seems to be declarer's problem as opposed to an inability to count or a fear of taking a risk. Of course I never got around to that separate category for perhaps obvious reasons, starting with the simple fact that a winner can look like any card in the deck, and from there recognizing that any butchering of a hand could easily fall into this category or in a lot of other categories, where many misplayed hands indeed now reside. In any event, this was a hand where a declarer had his contract plus an overtrick well in hand, but with some fiddle-faddling around managed to go down.

I was going through a stack of hands piled up for later perusal and found I'd printed out four different declarers' handling of this hand. The contracts ranged from 2 hearts to four, with nobody picking up 10 tricks, 3 picking up 9, and that declarer just referred to, making 8 when 10 were within easy reach. The key to the hand is to get some club ruffs in the short hand, unless the defense starts with trump leads, in which case, I would say the key to the hand is the diamond finesse. The fact that you've got a singleton opposite an ace doesn't cut any ice, since the goal isn't to have zero diamond losers, exactly (winning the battle but losing the war?), but two diamond winners.

In any event, one declarer had the contract practically handed to him when the defense took two quick club tricks, West then leading a diamond. I hardly blamed declarer for declining the finesse here. He's practically got 10 tricks in hand! Actually, I just noted that the defense actually started with a spade lead and than cashed two club tricks, leaving West on lead! I mean, they'd cashed out all their winners, leaving declarer with what one would have thought an easy path to 10 tricks. Ruff a diamond (after winning with the ace), ruff a club . . . well, with the K if West ruffs in, low otherwise. Ruff a diamond, or cash a spade and ruff a spade, or indeed, if West ruffs the third club with the 10, you'll have to draw the J before trying another ruff. They all work. After ruffing your last club, get back, draw trump and claim. But this declarer wasn't going to have any of that. He cashed two heart tricks, and of course, having already declined the diamond hook, now had just one club ruff coming, and so held himself to 9 tricks. And this was the one in 4 hearts! He invited going down. There may have been some risks in the line advocated above, but there was a virtual certainty of going down on the line taken. Declarer just didn't seem to recognize the second club ruff as a winner -- and a necessary one at that.

But that wasn't even the declarer I was talking about above. This one, describing himself as advanced, took the opening lead of a heart and promptly cashed another heart. That cut him down to one club ruff, but the opening lead suggests that he had no chance of getting two ruffs, since he has to lose the lead twice to set up a ruff. But declarer now took a step toward 10 tricks by pushing the J of diamonds through. Well, now, he had the contract in hand. Count winners, count losers. By the latter count, he has to lose two clubs and a spade, while a third club will be ruffed and a fourth will go on the ace of diamonds. By the former count, he has six heart winners in the closed hand, one ruff coming, two diamond winners and a spade winner, for 10.

But something went astray here. For after pushing the J of diamonds through, declarer took another round of trump! He simply didn't seem to recognize that K in dummy as representing a separate heart trick, a seventh heart winner if he ruffs a club with it. Was he of the mind-set that he just couldn't bear to lose a trick until he had to? Can't say, but I've seen that mentality all too often. Of course, declarer's best play after pushing the J of diamonds through would have been to lose a club, and whatever the opps did, promptly lose another. He would eventually ruff one club and throw another on the ace of diamonds. He'd already done the tough part, or at least what some declarers would shy away from -- the diamond hook with a singleton -- and now only had to cash out.

Anyway, after winning trick 4 with the K of hearts, declarer now cashed the ace of diamonds -- and sluffed a spade! Whoa! That leaves him with the 6 of spades opposite K Q 5 and no access to dummy, which is to say, no assurance of a spade winner. The 3 of spades may not be a winner in its own right, but it's substantially a winner -- or a winner-enabler -- by representing the only access to a winner, the second round of spades. But it gets worse: declarer now led the 9 of diamonds, sluffing his last spade. Oh, he avoided a spade loser but made sure of a diamond loser, and that did nothing for his hand. Even if he'd uncovered a 4-3 diamond split, he wouldn't have the entries to exploit the long diamond, particularly since . . .

The defense now ran four club tricks, which with the K of diamonds meant declarer was down in a 3 contract. By refusing to lose 2 club tricks early, he made certain that he'd lose four later. He just didn't seem to recognize which cards represented winners, a rather necessary step prior to counting.

What went wrong here was evidently a matter of that topic I was so tentative about in my opening paragraph What Does a Winner Look Like? (This is being written years later, and incidentally, that topic was instituted some months later). Indeed, there seems to be an astonishing three different ways in which declarers didn't recognize a winner. The most obvious and least excusable is the declarer's third-round heart lead when there were no more trump out and declarer needed the ruff of a club. Next was declarer's getting down to one spade opposite K Q and no outside entry to dummy. The second spade spotcard is just as necessary to an assured spade winner here as the queen, which indeed did not turn out to be a winner for just that reason, that the second spotcard had been sluffed. And the third instance involved a finesse in diamonds, which needs some qualification. First, if the opponents cash two rounds of clubs, as happened once, and you have the ability to ruff two clubs, then you don't wanna take the diamond hook, for you'd have nothing to gain (what would you do with the ace?) and a lot to lose. Secondly, it's not quite the obvious, certain winner the K of hearts represented when two rounds of trump had been taken. Still, if you have certain entry to dummy if the finesse loses and the defense can't cash out all your losers, then that's a risk-free finesse that might win and would have done so here and where declarer had nothing to lose.