[JLOGIC]

BAM

AK8x
KTx
AQx
Jxx

Qx
AQJx
KJx
T87x

You get to 3N after basically 1C 1S 1N 3N. You get a highish diamond lead. Plan the play.

[aguahombre]

Yes, it was a funny one. We watched the declarers hang on to ten of their 11 tricks after being cute with the club suit. But we knew we probably would have done the same thing.

It was unfortunate that the person in position to cash the third club knew how to count AND was the one in possesion of the JT9 3rd of spades.

[JLOGIC]

gee thanks

[jallerton]

How strong are the opponents? What was the range of my 1NT rebid? If I've shown 12-14, it's slightly easier for the defence to place the remaining high cards than if I've shown 11-13 say.

I can certainly imagine circumstances in which I'd win the opening lead in dummy and play a low club. If LHO is 4234 with ♣HHxx or the equivalent and RHO fails to play high, LHO needs to switch to a spade now to break up the squeeze.

[gnasher]

Win the queen and lead a club to the 8. Win the continuation and play another club, then hope to squeeze someone in the black suits.

That gains by force when someone has a spade guard with ♣HH9x or ♣H9xx, and will work on other layouts if they don't manage to cash the third club. It loses if the suit is 9x-AKQx and RHO manages to play low, or if they cash three clubs when spades were already coming in.

Finding ♠J109 trebleton is a 1/70 chance, so playing clubs seems obviously right.

Edit: "By force" was an overbid - as Jeffrey says, they may be able to break up the squeeze by playing spades. I think it will be quite hard for them to do that.

This post has been edited by gnasher: 2012-December-08, 03:45

[JLOGIC]

Good job, it is clearly superior to lead a club from dummy but I and both declarers on vugraph who were presumably good all led one from their hand. My counterpart (either brink or drijver) led one from dummy and was rewarded when RHO popped with AK9xx (hard to fault him looking at JT9 third of spades).

I wonder why it seemed intuitive to lead towards dummy. I didn't really think about it. No one else that I talked to led a club from dummy rather than hand but I'm sure some other people found it.

[gnasher]

JLOGIC, on 2012-December-08, 04:41, said:

I wonder why it seemed intuitive to lead towards dummy.

I expect it's because that would be the right play if we actually wanted to set up a trick in the suit.

[cherdano]

Interesting, for me the intuitive line in clubs is to start from dummy.

[Fluffy]

I had the same thoughs of Andy, leading from dummy to create a false image on opponents.