[Zloty]

Contract 4♥by South,lead J♣

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[Fluffy]

draw trumps before they ruff

[mikeh]

Fluffy, on 2013-September-16, 14:24, said:

draw trumps before they ruff

I think more accurately: 'try to draw trumps before they ruff'.

Maybe gonzalo and I are missing the interesting part of this hand, but I can't see why this hand is posted at all.

[manudude03]

I can only assume hearts are 4-1....

[mikeh]

manudude03, on 2013-September-16, 16:59, said:

I can only assume hearts are 4-1....

Good point, and I was too hasty.

We can attempt to cater to 4-1 (not stiff Ace)trumps by ducking the club. The rationale is that if they blindly continue, we now play 2 rounds of trump, the long trump ducking perforce. We now switch to diamonds and hope that the hand with the long trump has the diamond Ace. If it is short, hence a ruff is available, we want to prevent communication in clubs.

However, this is really a parlay of factors.

For one thing, a 4-1 trump break is no more probable than a 4-1 diamond break, a priori. We might argue that the non-diamond lead makes that break less likely than the same in trump but, even if so, the difference would be low. I am ignoring clues from the auction: for example, if we showed a 5-3 fit, LHO might well lead A from Axxx but might well choose not to lead a stiff, less he pick up the suit for us.

However, we give the opps an easy diamond shift IF the suit is 4-1 and we duck the club, and we might even lose on a 3-2 diamond break if they shift now. That is the key: if we win and play trump, we make on all hands on which the reds break 3-2, while if we duck, we lose (against accurate defenders) on most hands where both suits break 3-2. Since this represents a plurality of the layouts, we should cater to this situation.

Besides which, ducking isn't a universal safety play against 4-1 trump. If the long trump has short diamonds, and we switch to diamonds after discovering the trump split, we are down on the ruff anyway if the long trump has the short diamonds and the diamond Ace is, as it rates to be, in the long diamond hand. IOW, the safety play is imperfect and doesn't come close to making the 'duck the club' line as likely to win as the 'win and lead trump' line.

Accordingly, winning clubs and playing trump is definitely the practical approach.

So while I was perhaps a little too quickly dismissive of the problem, the answer is still, and imo very clearly, the same: win and play trump.