JustaDummy, on 2012-March-18, 10:46, said:
Sorry, I'm struggling with that. I'm trying to plan the hand and I see the basic principle of establishing two long ♦ tricks, but will I have the entries into dummy when I need them? My only way in is via the long ♠s and to use these I first need to void in dummy's ♥ suit, which looks like your first strategy (ruff 2♥ and one ♦) is required by default. I'm really not sure, but I think that if I start on that route the ♦ route becomes unavailable
You are correct. If we erroneously pull three rounds of trumps, and they play ♥ every time we play a ♦ to try to establish it as a long suit, we will run out of entries to the diamonds before we're able to enjoy them.
If the defense errs and plays a club instead of a heart at any point, and ♦ are 3-3, then we have just enough entries to set them up and we'll still have a trump to get over to them.
Obviously it's better for declarer to ruff his losers in dummy before pulling trumps. It's a good hand to demonstrate the importance of counting your winners and losers before you set out declaring the hand. You can count 2 club winners, and no winners anywhere outside of trumps, so we know we need to take 8 tricks with our spade cards. If we pull three rounds, that leaves us with only 2♣, 3 rounds of ♠, and then 2 more ♠ winners in each hand = 9 tricks.
If we ruff 3 losers first, we can take 2♣+3 ruffs in dummy+5 ♠ tricks in hand.