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

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

The defense takes the first three tricks: East captures the opening lead with the A and returns the 4. I put up the King, which is taken by West’s Ace. West cashes the J and leads the 4. I win the K and decide to ruff the 9 with the 9.

Now I need to draw trumps, so I run the Q. The finesse succeeds, but West shows out! So trumps are 0-4. That leaves me with this position:

	10 7 J A Q 9 7 —
	— A 10 8 7 5 K J —

I've lost three tricks, and although there are no more losers outside of the trump suit, it looks as though I have a sure trump loser, since East still has three hearts to the King, and I can finesse through him only one more time. Of course, I can afford one more loser at my contract of 3, but at matchpoints you have to fight for every overtrick.

Time to go to work! The books all cover this situation: when you have a finessing position in trumps but not enough trumps in dummy to lead through your RHO, the solution is a “trump coup.” I don’t think I’ve ever pulled off this play before, but fortunately, trump coups pretty much play themselves, provided you remember the key mantra: reduce your trump holding to the same length as that of the defender with the remaining trumps. This may require several dummy entries, so watch your entries carefully.

East has three trumps left, so I need to ruff twice in my hand to reduce my trumps to three, and then get back to dummy one more time. Fortunately, I am already in dummy, and the diamond suit can provide the necessary entries, provided I overtake the King and Jack. (Bonus points for creating entries by overtaking!)

I ruff the 7, overtake K with A, ruff 10, and overtake J with Q to produce:

	— J 9 7 —
irrelevant		— K 6 4 — —
	— A 10 8 — —

After running the J (which could also have been done earlier), a diamond at trick twelve ensnares East’s King of trumps. Making four!

Afterwards, though, I saw that we got only 4.5 matchpoints out of 12! Pretty much everyone had made ten tricks for either 170 or 420; there was only one 140, and there was even a 450! Was everyone in this Flight B game really executing the same trump coup? I suppose some Easts may have mistakenly covered the Q, ending declarer’s troubles. But even assuming the same defense that I got, probably some declarers just found a simpler way to make the contract: instead of ruffing the 9 at trick five, play K, overtake J with A and discard the 9 on the Q.

Should I have played it that way? It risked a ruff if diamonds were 5-2, and there weren’t sufficient entries to draw trumps and get the discard afterwards. So I thought ruffing the 9 was better. But anyone who chose the discarding play got an easy chance to lead through the K three times.

So the trump coup got me out of a tight spot, but there was no real need to be in it in the first place.

The full deal:

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

[Alexandria Regional, Jerry Machlin Pairs, Flight B, 7-5-2003]