Gerry Weston had the misfortune to have a faulty robot as a partner this week, and was not able to emulate Ryan Stephenson's recent successes with the automaton. I wonder how long it will be before the robots find a way to make the following hand:
The winning line in 6H by East is very pretty, but may be anti-percentage, and we enjoyed finding it in the pub afterwards. On a trump lead, you can arrange to ruff two spades in dummy, but you still have to negotiate the club suit for one loser. And with the king of clubs wrong that does not seem possible. However let us see what materialises...
We win the trump lead in East, and play the ace, king and ruff a spade. We then play the ace of diamonds and ruff a diamond. On this trick South is single-suited-squeezed. If he unblocks the top diamonds, declarer can establish a second diamond trick, so he must retain a high diamond. Now declarer ruffs his last spade and leads a diamond to the king, discarding a club and endplaying South. This relies on South having HHx in diamonds, or failing to unblock with Kxx.
The robot just played a club towards the queen, of course, and duly went one down. One needs some table presence to make this slam, and that is one thing robots don't have .. yet. The human might reason that South would have led a club if he didn't have the king, and one should play the squeeze. And there was the curious incident of the lack of a lead-directing double by North of 5C ...
At our table, we were defending the more mundane contract of 4H by East and Stefanie led a club from the South hand, shortening the play. But that was no matchpoints for us.
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