[yunling]

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West led ♥A and switched to a trump.
Not a difficult problem, but I got it wrong at the table again

[Hanoi5]

Win, ♦AK, heart Q?

Win, ♦AK, trump to the table, ♦Q to park a club, small club to the K.

The problem is spades 3-1 with West long in spades.

[Hanoi5]

Or... Win. heart to cover whatever East plays

[nige1]

yunling wrote "West led ♥A and switched to a trump. Not a difficult problem, but I got it wrong at the table again "

Join the club

My guess: Cover with dummy's ♠9. If East covers win in hand. Exit with ♥Q (hoping that West has ♥K). Intending to ruff 2♥s in dummy, making 7 X ♠ and 3 X ♦.

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[johnu]

No obvious problems if trumps are 2-2 if you pitch a club on ♦Q. Assuming the opponents lead A from AK, I would win the the trump switch cheaply, cash ♦AK and lead ♥Q. If trumps aren't 2-2, and west continues with a trump, win in dummy, cash ♦Q and pitch a club. Play a club to the ♣K. If East wins, you can ruff 2 hearts in dummy. If West wins, and plays a 3rd trump, you can try a ruffing finesse in clubs, eventually pitching 1 heart and ruffing the other.

[yunling]

The full hand:

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Johnnu's line turned up to be the winning one.
Since we can suppose west started with HK(or defence could have won the second heart and put you to a guess in clubs already so better not to worry about that), the main problem is the 3-1 trump split.
In fact I won the lead with ♠9, led a heart to Q. West won with K and led another trump, and the contract is doomed, when west can discard a diamond on the last round of hearts and ruffed my ♦Q.

[nige1]

Yunling wrote "The full hand:. Johnnu's line turned up to be the winning one. Since we can suppose west started with HK(or defence could have won the second heart and put you to a guess in clubs already so better not to worry about that), the main problem is the 3-1 trump split. In fact I won the lead with ♠9, led a heart to Q. West won with K and led another trump, and the contract is doomed, when west can discard a diamond on the last round of hearts and ruffed my ♦Q."

I like YunLing's unsuccessful line. Johnu's line is good but fails too. As the cards lie, the winning line is to ruff out West's tripleton ♥AKx.

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[phil_20686]

Its a pretty good line to just win the spade in dummy and play a heart at once, covering east's card. Here, assuming that east plays the J of hearts, west wins and plays a spade. Then you can win the second spade cheaply in hand, and use the diamonds as transport to ruff two hearts. This works whenever the person with 3 hearts has 4 diamonds. Since you are missing 8 diamonds, that's 1/3 that the diamonds are 4-4, 1/2 that they are 5-3, and 1/4 of the rest (since you need no ruffs if diamonds 6-2 or worse), making it about 60% of 3-1 breaks.

As it happens, that fails.

The second line that I thought of is to win the spade cheaply in hand, then play AK of diamonds and exit with the heart Q. If lho continues a second spade, win in dummy, and if the spades are 3-1 play the diamond Q pitching a club and then a club. This will win on 3-1 spade breaks where either of the heart K or the club ace is with the singleton spade, and if all that fails, you can still take the ruffing club finesse. This needs diamonds no worse than 5-3 (since if its 6-2 they can probably arrange to ruff the diamond Q with trumps 2-2 and that is basically game over), so its about 7/8 * 0.8 = 65% of 3-1 breaks, but less a little bit because some 2-2 spade breaks can arrange to beat you either because the diamonds are 7-1 or 6-2.

As it happens that also fails.