April 14, 2011

I'll continue this week with some defensive carding.  Suppose you hold AK in a 
suit and lead the Ace.  What does it mean if your partner plays the Jack?

If you aren't sure exactly what it means, then you are correct.  Obviously the
context is very important.  What is the contract?  What was the bidding?  What 
cards did dummy hold in the suit?  About the only thing you can be sure of is 
that partner does not (or should not) hold the Queen.  Let's look at two hands 
where this came up last week.

On Board 15, West is on lead against 3 Hearts and leads the Ace of Clubs from 
AK5. Dummy comes down with 987.  What should West do if partner plays the 
Jack of Clubs?  East/West are playing “Upside-down” attitude, which means that 
a low card is encouraging and a high card is discouraging.  (However, keeping a 
useful card should almost always take priority over signaling to partner.)  I was 
not at this table to see the auction, but based on the likely bidding sequence, it 
is not possible that the Jack of Clubs was a singleton.  It seems East probably 
has JTx(x) and wants West to switch to another suit.

[As an aside, if the contract were 3NT, might East be unblocking with the Jack 
so that West could run the clubs?  No.  If East held QJx and wanted to unblock, 
he should unblock with the Queen first (since the Jack should deny the Queen).]

On the same board, what if East played the 6 of Clubs at trick one?  Then what 
should West do? Playing upside-down attitude, if (big if) this looks like a low 
card to West, he should continue with the King.  East probably either has the 
Queen,  has a doubleton club and is looking for a ruff, or for some reason 
(based on holdings in the other suits) just doesn't want West to switch.

Now lets look at the four club suit holdings and consider East's choices.
                987
AK5                                JT6
                Q432

East is in a bit of an awkward situation here.  East would like West to switch. Two
considerations:

1. Remember, E/W are playing upside-down attitude, so East has to use a high card to discourage and a low card to encourage.
2. Dummy has 987, so if East uses the Jack to discourage, hoping to later get in to lead the Ten through declarer's Queen, it will go T-Q-K-7, and
   dummy's 8 will set up for a later trick. (Leading the 6 instead of the Ten would be better for East, to make declarer guess where the Ten was.)

My thoughts here are that East should play the 6 and hope that even though it 
is his lowest card, partner won't read it as his lowest (since 789) are in dummy, 
and will switch suits.   Then when East gets in later with a major suit King, he 
can play the Jack of Clubs, trapping declarer's Queen.  However, if East held JT2 
and declarer held Q643, then maybe East should play the Jack at trick one, 
clearly discouraging. Make declarer figure out the spades himself later. I am 
certainly open to comments on this--I don't think it is obvious.


Now look at Board 5.  My partner led the Ace of Spades against West's 2-Heart 
contract:
          A K 8
          10
          J 10 8 6 3
          K 5 3 2
10 5 4 3 2              9 7 6
K J 7                     Q 9 4 3 2
A K                       Q 9 7 4
A 9 6                     Q
          Q J
          A 8 6 5
          5 2
          J 10 8 7 4

I held QJ and carelessly played the Jack (low to show encouragement?), defying 
what I said above that the Jack denied the Queen!   Oops.  Partner probably 
played me for JTx and understandably switched suits.  If I had played Queen, 
and he trusted me, then he could have followed with a low spade, knowing that 
I would either win the Jack or ruff.  As it turned out, it didn't matter that he 
switched, as we still took three heart tricks.  We set the contract one trick, but 
did not get a good result since a couple of N/S pairs scored nine tricks in clubs.