Impress Your Palooka

Your regular partner is busy and you're reduced to playing with a particularly uncouth palooka at the club. At unfavourable vulnerability, you pick up ♠ Q7 ♥ AJT7 ♦ 42 ♣ AKT85 and open 1 ♣ as dealer, with some misgivings about your rebid. Upon hearing 1 ♦ from your palooka partner, you bid the automatic 1 ♥. At your next turn—a crashboombang later—you can only pass the palooka's 7 ♣ “rebid”. Your fears are somewhat allayed when dummy hits the table:

♠ AKT
♥ 5
♦ AK873
♣ Q972

♠ Q7
♥ AJT7
♦ 42
♣ AKT85

Lead: ♠ 5

Your uncouth partner is sure to give it to you unabashedly if you go down. Avoid this sorry fate.

Second, assume your partner bid only 6 ♣. Now how do you take insurance against a volley of abuse?

Pick-a-Double-Squeeze

This interesting hand popped up at the Alumni Club pairs game last sunday.

Playing SAYC, sitting South (hands rotated) you open 2C and LHO bids 2S. You end up in 6C and dummy tables:

LHO leads a top spade and shifts to a trump. You can count 11 tricks off the top. The two best options available to you for the twelfth trick are:

Double Squeeze #1:

If east alone holds the diamond guard, you can run trumps (pitching a spade, a diamond and two hearts), cash DA and DK arriving at this position with the lead in dummy:
West has to hang on to the high spade, and east has to hang on to a diamond honour, so neither can hold three hearts. Cash the AK of hearts and watch the lowly 3 of hearts fetch your twelfth trick.

Double Squeeze #2:

If east holds a five card or longer heart suit, you can pull trumps, cash the ace of diamonds and the top two hearts, and run the trumps (pitching a spade, a diamond and a heart) arriving at this position on the play of the last trump:
West has to hang on to his top spade, so you pitch the SQ. Watch for east's discard. I hope you have been counting the hearts, for either the H3 has to cash, else east still has a heart. In that case, you can cross to the DK and the small diamond has to win.


Which double squeeze to choose? You have seven cards outstanding in either red suit, but the presence of good intermediates in diamonds makes Squeeze #1 look more attractive; it will work when east holds any five card or longer diamond, as well as QJx or QJxx.

If west had shifted to a heart at trick 2, though, you can only play for Squeeze #2.

In reality the actual layout was quite boring. East turned up with BOTH a five card heart suit AND QJxx in diamonds, so not only did either squeeze work, even a simple automatic squeeze on diamonds and hearts is enough to secure the slam.

Worse still, at our table, Guthi settled for a conservative 3NT, so his squeeze skills were not tested; I became declarer and after the opponents cashed their top two spades I claimed. How boring.

Cheers
Prashanth.