[smerriman]

Gilithin, on 2023-December-19, 13:13, said:

This is why the rule for cross ruffs is to cash the side suit winners first.

That's definitely a rule, but not relevant here - there are no side suit winners.

[Gilithin]

smerriman, on 2023-December-19, 14:29, said:

That's definitely a rule, but not relevant here - there are no side suit winners.

I thought I was looking at 3 red suit winners...but you are probably right.

[smerriman]

Gilithin, on 2023-December-19, 16:05, said:

I thought I was looking at 3 red suit winners...but you are probably right.

Yeah, they're the suits you're ruffing though The usual advice is to cash tricks in the 3rd suit before cross-ruffing the other two, to prevent the winners in the 3rd suit going away later. Here it's a different situation about making sure you can ruff enough hearts without getting overruffed.

[Gilithin]

smerriman, on 2023-December-19, 16:33, said:

Yeah, they're the suits you're ruffing though The usual advice is to cash tricks in the 3rd suit before cross-ruffing the other two, to prevent the winners in the 3rd suit going away later. Here it's a different situation about making sure you can ruff enough hearts without getting overruffed.

If you are cross ruffing, you generally take all of the side suit tricks you want to cash as early as possible. If you are ruffing in only one hand, you sometimes need to hold back a winner in your ruffing suit until after drawing trumps in order to make sure the ruffs go through safely without losing the lead.

[jillybean]

So how many winning plays are there on this hand?

[Gilithin]

jillybean, on 2023-December-19, 20:43, said:

So how many winning plays are there on this hand?

Since the ♠10 is in South and suits behave, and we know from the auction that North has 4+ hearts, it looks like any reasonable line of play works providing declarer does not play more than 1 round of trumps. You either cross ruff directly or leave yourself ♠K9 over ♠T7 on the last 2 tricks with the lead coming from dummy. Other than blindly drawing trumps, I cannot find any logical line that goes down on this layout, even with GIB. Maybe this is a good challenge for Mike - how can declarer go down without doing something obviously stupid?

[jillybean]

The 7/10 players who only made 9 tricks would be thrilled to hear that.

[Gilithin]

jillybean, on 2023-December-20, 18:40, said:

The 7/10 players who only made 9 tricks would be thrilled to hear that.

How many of those 7 just drew trumps because that's what you do as declarer in a suit contract?