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Last Wednesday someone at the club asked me if I still learned anything from playing bridge. Having played duplicate for 23 years and spending a lot of time reading and discussing bridge in the meantime, one might think that I have learned everything that I can possibly learn about the game and that the only reason why I am not a World champion is just my lack of talent.
But you never stop learning. At least, I hope that I learned something from this morning's BBO tournament, although I am not sure if I think correctly about this hand. That's why I am posting it here.
As you can see, I lead partner's spade suit and he gave me a spade ruff after winning the first trump trick. I decided to switch to a diamond which I suppose is reasonable, but I think I was wrong to lead the systematic ♦Q.
What happened was that partner played low and declarer won the ♦A. I didn't know if my partner has ♦K so I got pseudo-squeesed on the clubs and decided to hold on to diamonds rather than hearts, so eventually dummy's heart suit ran.
If I had lead ♦J instead, partner would probably have played ♦K which may seem wasteful but we could afford that, and it would have told me that I don't need to keep a small diamond.
Or maybe better to play a small diamond? That's silly if ♦T holds but that doesn't sound so likely. And if declarer had a third diamond (they might not play support doubles, who knows) we might not be able to afford letting ♦J and ♦K go to the same trick.
Probably I should have guessed right anyway, opener is not so likely to have ♦K. But I just thought that it was a cute idea to pretend not to have ♦Q in order to manipulate partner to disclose the diamond position.
What do you think?
MultiQuote
yes for me to keep hearts I have to rely on partner to keep diK