BRIDGE MASTERCLASS

You are South in 6 ♠ , and the defence play two rounds of trumps. Can you make the contract? Assuming that you cross ruff hearts and clubs, you can still only come to 11 tricks. You would have planned to set up dummy’s fifth heart, but this plan is thwarted by the bad break, as you can see. so your only hope has to depend on a squeeze.

i keep harping on about ‘squeezes’ because they are so important as your last- ditch chance of making contracts when you appear to be a trick short. You start thinking about a squeeze play as soon as you realise you’ve got to produce an extra trick from somewhere. in this case, it would be at trick eight, when West shows out of hearts, knowing that West has a master heart outstanding, you can hope that he also holds both ♦ Q and ♦ J; you can see that he does have both, and you therefore have a squeeze position. (see tomorrow).