February Hand of the Month 

By Joel Hoersch
Editor, District 22 Forum 

South plays 4Í, after East has doubled North’s negative response of 2Ë for the lead. 

Í 106 
Ì 109864 
Ë 1032 
Ê Q108 

Í K542            Í J7 
Ì Q72             Ì 53 
Ë J75                     Ë KQ986 
Ê J62             Ê K953 

Í AQ983 
Ì AKJ 
Ë A4 
Ê A74 

I have never been a fan of Speedball games; we all have enough bad habits to correct that we really shouldn’t burden ourselves with unnecessary time pressure which leads to over-hasty decisions. But, as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (those prominent philosophers from the Rolling Stones) once observed, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” The hand above occurred in an online Speedball IMP tournament recently, and I was reluctantly sitting in the South seat, playing an over-optimistic spade game instead of the more rational heart game. 

So, if you want to duplicate the time factor, you have precisely 4.5 minutes to come up with the winning answers for both the declarer and for the defense. But of course the hand is really instructive enough to warrant a lot more time than that, so I advise you to study the hand as long as you like before reading on. Hopefully, that study time should give you more ammunition to critique the plays made by the declarer and the defense, so that you can decide after reading the sequence of plays below, what went right ... and what went wrong. 

T1: Ë5, 2, Q, A. 
T2: ÍA, 2, 6, 7. 
T3: ÍQ, K, 10, J. 
T4: ËJ, 3, 6, 4. 
T5: Ë7, 10, K, Í3. 
T6-7: Spades cashed, West follows, dummy pitches a club and a heart, East pitches a club and a diamond. 
T8-10: Hearts played from the top, West winning the queen while East pitches another club. 
T11: Ê2,10,K(Whew!Thank you, God!), A. 
T12-13: Claim. 

Analyzing this hand from the declarer’s point of view is not really complicated: you have to be lucky with ÍJ doubleton to have any hope, since you can afford to lose only one trump trick. Plus you need diamonds breaking 3-5 and hearts 3-2, so that when West wins ÌQ he is endplayed into having to open up the “frozen” suit ... clubs. Finally, you have to guess successfully about the ÊK and ÊJ in the endplay position. 

But what about the defense? Did they have no say in the matter? The answer is that they had two chances to beat this contract. First of all, it wasn't necessary to rush to play a third round of diamonds. West needs an exit card when he wins the heart, so if the defense is timed right, he will still have a diamond to get out with later. 

But, it’s tough to crime the defenders when they play the obvious line, so West has to be made of sterner stuff if he releases his third diamond. Now when hearts are played, he must unblock his queen to avoid the endplay. That way he wins no heart trick, but his partner wins the ÊK and a long diamond to beat the hand! 

So the final question to be asked about this hand is ... if a world-class player were holding the West cards, did I as declarer guess correctly at Trick 11? 

Of course the answer is no: if there is no heart unblock, it would be because it would have been futile. Therefore the defense’s only chance is to have me misguess, so now I must play for West to hold the ÊK. 

Lucky I wasn’t tested on that one: I doubt if I would have been up to that much analysis in my 4.5 minutes of time!