How do I get to the other hand?
Have you ever found yourself stuck in the wrong hand playing bridge? On this hand we can unblock the club suit to give us three entries to dummy.
2NT Opening bid
21 high card points here so I'm going to open this 2NT. Strong balanced hand.
Having bid 2NT we've passing the decision making over to North because we've described our strength. So if North wants to stop and game, then that's all we need to do. North bids 3NT, and we become declarer.
Planning the play
Let's have a quick count of our likely tricks and make a plan. We've got ♥A, ♥K, ♦A, ♦K so that's four. We've got ♠A is five, probably four club tricks. So we are probably going to make this contract, but we always want to be greedy. If we're in 3NT making 3, but everyone else is in 3NT making 4, 5 or 6 then we are going to get a bad score because our scores are compared to other people holding the same cards. Doesn't matter if we score 400, it's our score compared to everybody else.
So what I want to do here is I want to finesse the spades. I want to take a double finesse in the spades. So I want to play a low spade to the ♠9 and get back over to the table and play a low spade to the ♠T and maybe even get back to the table again and play a low spade to the ♠J. I want to take three spade finesses and I'm going to hope that East over there has got at least one of the spade honours. So how do I get to the table three times? Two is easy enough because we've got the Ace King of clubs.
Spot the entry!
Where's our third entry to the table? It's actually going to come from the club suit. We've got four clubs in each hand. We've actually got three entries to the table if we are careful. So I'm going to win the ace of hearts. I'll play the queen of clubs. Now I don't want to waste that ♣2, I need to keep that because later the two I'm going to use to get over to the ♣4. So I'm going to play the ♣7 now to the ♣A. Later I'll play the ♣5 over to the ♣K. Finally, I'll be able to play the ♣2 over to the ♣4.
tags: #declarerplay
