rogerclee, on 2011-February-26, 03:00, said:
Matchpoints
Maybe you don't like the bidding.
LHO leads the
♣6 (attitude) you play the 7, and RHO plays the T.
Obviously, most of the field is in 4
♠, making 10+ tricks, unless West has got doubleton Heart and finds the lead.
In 4
♠ otherwise, there's also a good chance for 11 tricks on the same Club lead (East appears to have QTx) if the Heart are guessable : take lead, duck Diamond (they are not 5-2), ruff a Diamond small, club to hand, ruff Diamond High, ruff out
♣Q, trump, Heart toward dummy. But there's nothing we can do about that when we play 3NT.
Our target is to make 9 tricks when Hearts are 2-5 (beat 4S), and 10 tricks otherwise.
At trick 1 we have made a good job : East will place us with AKx.
If we finesse the
♥Q and it fails, East will have a good picture of our HCP : we should have 28 HCP (do we always open 19 counts ?), and he will know about the Heart and Club situation, probably (that's 8 of the 12 missing from his POV). If (1) he has a Diamond honor, he probably won't play one now because his partner only asset rates to be a (small) Spade honor. So he'll play a Heart back and we'll probably be dead ; if (2) he doesn't have a Diamond honor he'll play Diamond, and we'll also be in a bad situation. Hence we hope that West has the Heart Queen if we happen to play a Heart.
A good play seems to be [2]
♥J covered to the King (East should normally duck with the Ace to offer us a chance to go wrong on the next turn). [3]
♣ to Ace, [45]KQ of Spade and if Spades are 3-2 [6]
♠J to Ace [7] Club.
East to play.