Quackery is defined as dishonest practice and is frowned upon in bridge. It is perfectly fine to duck with the ace when declarer plays to the king, queen, but not acceptable to feign that you have the ace. So, you have to decide to duck in tempo.
We had a distinctly below-par performance at last week's Woodberry Pairs. I suppose you know the only sport or game in which a below-par performance is good. The other conundrum arising from that is "Which are the only four-letter sports that begins with a T?" The official answers are TEJO, a sport with discs, and TREC, a French equestrian sport, but there is another. I digress. This was the hand which triggered off this blog.
We had an auction which at least complied with the World War II motto "Careless Talk Costs Lives". We bid 2NT-6NT which had the benefit of not tipping off North to the winning club lead and Andy Conway led the seven of hearts. I won and led a diamond at trick two, as that suit will have to be tackled some time, and played the king from dummy. And returning to hand with a top spade I led a second diamond. It is almost symmetrical and I played the queen after a little thought. My reasoning was that some of the time South would have won the first diamond if he had the ace. And Matthew Hendrickson was far too ethical to indulge in quackery by ducking slowly. In theory, the right technical line here is to run the nine of diamonds on the first round, as you pick up AJxx of diamonds with North, but the practical play of leading twice towards the king, queen, is the one I would choose. If North does have AJxx of diamonds, you can still fall back on the club finesse.
And if the queen of diamonds holds, you can show off your knowledge of squeezes by running all the major-suit winners. If North does have four diamonds and the king of clubs, you will emerge with an unexpected overtrick.
