Knowledge is Power By Frances Hinden

Source: 

Sometimes knowing your opponents can help you play the hand.  Sometimes not knowing your opponents can be fatal.  Play problems in real life always have a context – the state of the match, the standard of the opponents, and how well you know them just for a start. On the first hand I was West, defending 3NT against a pro who has recently moved to my country and didn’t know me. (Neither did his partner.) 1NT= 15-17 Declarer saw me lead the 2, attitude. He ducked this to the queen, and East played the 3 back, current count, to the jack, king and duck. I (West) then played the 10 to dummy’s ace.  Declarer asked about our leads, leads when returning partner’s suit, signals, and discards.  He was told we played reverse attitude (& standard count) and a lot of (standard) suit preference. Declarer now successfully chose to run the jack of clubs from dummy (good choice – perhaps he thought hearts might be 3-5) and cashed the ace of spades followed by the club suit. He saw me, on his left, discard the 8, the 6, and the 5. He saw my partner, on his right, discard the 2 and 7. Sometimes it’s an advantage being an unknown woman.  He chose to trust my signal, and played the jack of diamonds from dummy. One off for a flat board, because teammates took a more straightforward in clubs and opponents cashed the hearts and theA for one off.  This was the full hand: Next time I play him, I’ll have to guess whether he remembers me (and this hand) or not.  Sadly once this has worked once, it won’t work again against anyone who remembers you.  I’ll have to go back to giving ambiguous signals. The next day (this was a multi-day KO event) it was my turn to play 3NT against two English pros I know reasonably well. 1 = diamonds ; 2NT = 18-19 any The 1opening included all balanced 18-19s without a 5-card major, and the rebid could have concealed a diamond fit. LHO led the 4, fourth highest, to the jack and queen. I took the simple approach of ace of diamonds, diamond finesse. RHO returned the 8 to the 10 and duck, and LHO returned the 2, on which RHO discarded the 5 (they were playing standard attitude discards, and the 5 looked fairly middling). This left me with the problem of whether to play RHO for the ace of hearts or the king of spades.  I knew both my opponents, and expected LHO to be an honest signaller, because they more often played in weaker fields where declarer isn’t watching; RHO was going to be more tricky.  I decided to trust LHO and successfully took the spade finesse. The specially-imported European pro who was declarer at the other table took a slightly different approach which I think is rather better.  He had played against my teammates before, but not often, knowing they are good players but not knowing their signalling propensities very well. At trick 2 he played the king of hearts from hand.  If that lost, he was is much the same position having to decide whether to take the spade finesse or the heart finesse (the entries are such that he probably won’t be able to check for Jx of hearts before taking the spade finesse). However, when the king of hearts held he had a strong inference that LHO had the ace.  Both players ducked smoothly, but LHO would never take the ace while RHO would take it at least some of the time in order to play another club.  This is a great example of seeing the hand from the defense’s point of view. Flat board, but achieved in a different way. Finally, another 3NT on the last day: Yet again I was playing two specially-imported European pros. Neither of them had played much in England before, but it was the final of the event so they might assume I knew what I was doing (one of their team-mates knew us too).  They hadn’t played much together – in earlier sets one of them usually played with their team sponsor who was now sitting out. LHO led the 4 to the Jack, which I ducked.  RHO returned the 2 to the ace and LHO’s 5.  Opponents were playing 4th highest lead and standard returns. I cashed two rounds of clubs, and LHO discarded a spade on the second round. At this point I thought that the signals to tricks one and two implied that diamonds were 4-4. I knew that it’s easy for West to conceal the fifth diamond, but I thought it was harder for East to give false count at trick 2. If that was the case, I might as well play a heart: perhaps RHO would rise with the ace – or perhaps RHO had singleton ace – and it didn’t seem to hurt.  If a heart to the queen held I could take another couple of clubs before deciding what to do in spades. What happened, of course, is that LHO won the ace of hearts and cashed 3 more diamonds; they were 5-3 all along and RHO started with QJ2. I should have reflected that when I played the 10 at trick 1, the position was sufficiently obvious that both opponents knew they could false card.  Also, clubs being 1-5 makes it much more likely that West has 5 diamonds to have led one rather than a spade (although he still could have long hearts). Perhaps I have the same problem as my LHO on the previous board – I don’t play enough against players good enough to do that entirely in tempo. I got lucky on this board. Had I decided to play on spades at once, I probably would have played East for the short queen of spades as I can’t pick up length with West.  That would have been two off.  At the other table West (who had Q8542 A9 K8543 3) came in over the 1NT opening, so declarer knew who had the queen of spades and made the same eight tricks.