Thursday, June 26, 2008

The best claim I've heard of

I was reading Terence Reese's book Play these hands with me, and I highly recommend it. The book helps you to get inside an expert declarer's head and think the way he does. This makes all the difference between simply reading about expert plays and figuring out all 52 cards in order to make those plays correctly.

The following hand had me smiling and shaking my head for a full minute after I read it.
The contract is 7NT and the 10 of diamonds is led. Reese won in dummy and led a club to his ace and east showed out. At this point Reese claimed all.

Can you figure out the line?

Here is his explanation: first test the spades by cashing AKQ.

If the spades break 3-3, then the marked club finesse provides the thirteenth trick.

If west has the long spades, then cash all the red suit winners, squeezing him in the black suits for the thirteenth trick.

If east has the long spades, then cash the king of clubs and the diamond winners, arriving at this position:
At this point, west has to hang on to three clubs so he can have at most one heart. Now pitch the club, take the club finesse and cash the CQ, squeezing east in the majors.

From reading Kelsey I can put a name to this squeeze: it is a positional double squeeze in the inverted form (yeah yeah I know all the theory :P).

Quite a claim! It would probably have been faster to just play the hand. But you must admit it makes for a highly entertaining read.

Cheers,
SP.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bring on the Greek and Latin anyday, forgive me for wandering into unknown territory!!
Myths :)

GRS86 said...

Studness!

Kedar said...

Was going through the archievs...

Very very high funda claim.. But, true.. It would be faster to play it..