No Messing With Finessing

29th August – Board 14: Love All. Dealer East.

It takes ages to get people to finesse and even longer to get them not to and the hand below was almost textbook……

	North: S J 10 9 8 3 2 H J D K 10 9 6 C Q 10
West: S A 5 H Q 9 5 3 D A 8 3 C K J 7 2		East: S 4 H A 10 8 7 6 2 D Q 7 4 C A 6 4
	South: S K Q 7 6 H K 4 D J 5 2 C 9 8 5 3

West	North	East	South
		1H	No
2NT	No	3S	No
4D	No	4H	End

There are probably many ways of getting to 4H and the one I suggest uses a Jacoby 2NT response to show a high card raise to game or better. 3S shows a singleton and 4D is a cue and 4H says that’s enough. Anyway let us suppose South leads the king of spades. How do you proceed? In cases such as these you should assume the adverse cards are lying as badly as possible in which case you might lose one heart, two diamonds and a club. Win the lead and play a low heart aiming to cover whatever card North plays. In this way you can guarantee to have one trump loser at most. When North plays the jack you obviously win with the ace and should now play the king of clubs, the ace of clubs and a low club towards the jack. If South has the queen it is true the finesse would have worked but that doesn’t matter because now the jack will be established as a discard for a diamond. But more importantly on occasion you will drop the doubleton queen from North when a diamond switch from that hand could be worrying. Indeed swap the king and knave of diamonds in the North/South hands and you would be defeated if you hadn’t played the clubs in the prescribed manner. As it happens – as it does so frequently – virtue has to be its own reward.