A very ordinary hand

It has been said that the way to win at bridge is to make sure you get the ordinary hands right. In other words, squeezes, endplays, deceptions, coups of various sorts, etc. don't come up sufficiently often to give an advantage to the better player. But ordinary hands come up all the time.

Here's a hand from yesterday's STAC game:

I was sitting West and essentially took no part in the proceedings. Our opponents, two experts who are married (to each other) and sometimes--but not usually--play together, had the auction all to themselves. I might have opened 1C in third seat and perhaps I should have but I suspect that would have pushed them into a making 4H).

At my club, every N/S pair was in a heart part-score, mostly 2H by North but sometimes, as at our table, 3H by North and, once, 3H by South. My partner led the C4, clubs being the only safe-looking lead, although either red deuce would also be safe on this layout. Declarer ruffed out the spades, took two diamond finesses and emerged with 10 tricks pointing his way. A flat board, right?

Wrong. This was by no means a flat board. Here were the scores: 1 @ 200 (11), 6 @ 170 (7.5), 3 @ 140 (3) and 2 @110 (.5). I'll dispense with the anomalous scores of 200 and 110 and concentrate on the 170s and 140s.

At first, I couldn't see why our score was below average (3.5). We didn't put a foot wrong. How could declarer not take 10 tricks. And then I saw it: some declarers must have taken the spade finesse.

This hand of course is a perfect illustration of the (general) superiority of a 4-4 trump fit over, say, a 5-3 or 5-2 trump fit. You can usually use long cards in the long suit to discard losers from the other hand while using small trumps to ruff with, possibly ruffing out losers to establish the long suit.

But the main point here is that considering a suit, the spades in this case, in isolation may yield a different plan than considering the suit as part of a whole hand. If you were in a spade (or notrump) contract here, you would consider your play in the spade suit and opt for the 43% likelihood of the bringing in the suit with a finesse against the queen, versus the 18% chance of dropping a doubleton or singleton queen. Not even a close decision.

But here, you are in a suit contract and you have the luxury of being able to ruff a spade (we'll assume that trumps are 3-2, as here, for the sake of simplicity). The probability of dropping the queen after a ruff is: 36% for a 3-3 split, plus the same 18% chance that the queen would have dropped anyway. That's a total probability of 54%. The failure zone (46%) is made up of 32.3% for Qxxx, 12% for Qxxxx, and 1.5% for Qxxxxx.

So, again, it's not really a close decision if you know your probabilities (54% vs. 43%). Incidentally, it's a very common error to regard the finesse as a 50/50 shot. But when we can only finesse twice, as here, there will be holdings on our right that we can't pick up: half of the Qxxxx and Qxxxxx layouts we noted above, that's to say 6.75% of cases.

The conclusion is that the situation where you are missing six cards is a tricky one--and also a common one. It's worth spending some time to learn the probabilities.