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

W	N	E	S
			1
P	2	P	3
P	P	P

The opponents open with Ace of trumps and a trump. Everyone follows. I draw the last trump, East discarding the 3. I note that they play upside-down attitude discards, so this suggests that East has the A, which is all to the good. Even so, with two club losers, a diamond loser, and the A out against me, I’ll have to lose no hearts to make my contract.

How can I do that? The problem with the heart combination is that, missing the Queen and the Jack, I have no way to avoid a heart loser if I start the suit myself, even if I could see all four hands. But perhaps I can force the opponents to help out.

I play a spade to the Jack, which holds. East then takes the K with the Ace and cashes his A and leads a club. I take my King, cash the Q, and we are down to:

	— K 9 4 7 4
	— A 10 2 6 8

There’s still no way for me to tackle the hearts myself, but now it’s easy to make the opponent’s help: I just exit with a club. West wins and pauses for a long time. What can he do? If he leads a low heart, I run it around to my hand and finesse the 9 next time. If he leads a high heart, I play the King and finesse the 10. In either case I win provided the heart honors are split. If West leads anything but a heart I get a ruff-sluff. Eventually he leads a club and I ruff, discard a heart from my hand, and claim.

For declarer, the lesson is that with the combination K9x opposite A10x, an endplay does not give declarer a 100% play for the remaining tricks (as it would if the 9 were the Jack), but it moves declarer up from a hopeless suit to one where he can get all the tricks on a guess.

But the real lesson of the hand is for the defense. At the end, West was on lead with 9 / Q8 / – / Q. In this position, West’s best play is to lead the Q boldly, as though he were happy to do it. The lead helps declarer, who can then get all the remaining tricks by guessing who has the J. But at least declarer has to guess. Declarer might imagine that West has the J behind the Queen, win with the A and finesse the 9. Then East scores the J.

West said afterwards, “You would have played for split honors?” and I agreed. Still, who knows what I would have really done if West had led the Q. It goes against the grain to put the Queen on the table, but if declarer has the AJ West’s position is hopeless, so he might as well play his partner for the J and give the defense a chance.

After all that, it turns out that we could make 2NT, so we only get 6 matchpoints out of 11. As is so often the case when I make a decent play, we had already lost most of the board in the bidding. My play got us back up to slightly above average, but I would have done better to bid 2NT instead of 3. I should have remembered that playing matchpoints, eight tricks at notrump beats nine tricks in a minor. Next time, with a choice between rebidding my minor and going to 2NT after an inverted minor raise, I’ll bid 2NT.

The full hand:

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

[Alexandria Regional, Open Pairs, 6-29-2005]