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This blog post is based on Chapter 6 - Watching Out for the Opponents, of the book Play of the Hand in the 21st Century. That chapter has many great examples of declarer hands where you may or may not hold up the play of your sure winner. This post focuses on making a set of recipes for studying and practicing just one of those examples.
Page 197 of the 2012 revision of the book presents this layout for any suit in a notrump contract. This is a suit combination exercise, not an entire deal. Assume there are other cards besides spades:
In the scenario, West leads the King. Declarer (South) has one sure trick with the Ace. If South takes the first trick, East or West may later regain the lead and play the Queen. West can proceed to take four tricks in the suit.
Declarer can’t manufacture more winners in spades; however, they can decide when to take their one winner, and perhaps prevent some losers. If declarer holds up (does not play) the Ace for two rounds of spades, then wins the third spade trick, West will be left with two spades and no way to reach them because East will be out of spades. Assuming, that is, that there is no other entry to the West hand in another suit.
In this scenario, declarer has 3 spades, dummy has 2, and RHO (East) has 3. That leaves West with 5. This distribution is what makes it possible (sometimes) to strand West’s long-suit winners. But when the dummy goes down and you see your 3-2 split in the suit, you can only hope for the 5-3 split in opponents’ hands; you won’t know until partway through the play of the hand.
However, you can infer some things. If West leads an honor, you can assume they likely have a sequence; if they lead a spot card, maybe it’s just a long suit with no winners until they run you (the good guys) out of cards in that suit.
Just from the “ifs” and assumptions posed by this one example, you can see that the use of the hold-up play depends on what else you might know about the opponent’s hands. You can’t see their cards, so you have to infer things from the auction and from their card play as the hand proceeds.
So, lacking a hard-and-fast one-size-fits-all rule, it is best to practice the general scenario, and see what it looks like across numerous deals. Enter the recipe (insert long, resonant gong sound)!
Make South the dealer, with no side vulnerable.
Let’s start with a shaper that makes it likely that South will open 1NT, West has decent points so he might be the opponent South worries about, East has puny points, and North has 8-9 HCP with any shape, possibly suitable for a 2NT response. We would like South to be declarer at some level of notrump, but of course much depends on the fall of the cards and the action of the bidding robots in your bridge-playing software, even with a shaper/recipe assist.
Now let’s generalize the cards based on the example from the book. The description of that one suit would be: North has two spot cards, East has three spot cards, South has an ace and two spot cards, West has the rest. Those new to the deal generator might ask, “Sensei! Must I not specify the exact cards in West?” To which I would reply with an indulgent chuckle, “No, Cricket (Grasshopper is that other guy), for by specifying spot cards and exact suit lengths in the other hands, have you not thereby silently specified that West will have quite an enviable sequence of honors, possibly requiring a hold-up play if one is to limit West’s winnings?” Upon hearing this, Cricket would be enlightened and/or irritated, as a simple “yes” or “no” might have sufficed.
Be sure to click the Red Button so that the deal generator will use both the shaper and the recipe when making your deal. Here’s the first one:
Hey! We got the spade distribution we wanted. But is this a good deal for our foray into the hold-up play? It might be. But for newbies, we prefer to be in notrump. N/S have a nice heart fit here—a might too nice. Let’s make it so North can’t get a 4-card heart suit:
Red Button that thing and get something like this:
It is acceptable. This recipe can give North a long minor suit that might tempt them to bid away from NT, but South will either redirect back to NT or N/S will just embark on a minor-suit adventure. NT is the more likely outcome, though.
Now bump the Number of Deals to 16 or however many times you want to practice this deal, generate a set, save it to a file in LIN or PBN format, and load it into your bridge-playing software of choice and have at it.
Admittedly, this recipe should result in a deal where South will hold up the ace of spades without having to give it too much thought. That’s OK—it’s good to practice the situations that are easy to spot. When you tire of that because it’s too much of the same thing, just vary your recipe. One quick way to make things more interesting is to change spot cards, specified with a “Z” (for zero HCP), to “X” for any card:
This can give you deals like this, where West still has the length in spades, but East might have a little firepower too. How will that affect your play?
Hyper-alert readers might also notice that if we change “Z” to “X” but leave the HCP the same as before in the shaper, our card distribution will not be radically different than that of the first recipe, because both the HCP of the shaper, and the choice of placeholders in the recipe, constrain what cards might land in a suit. So, you hyper-alert person you, you might reach a point where you also start varying the points in the shaper to allow more possibilities. In fact, you might reach a point where you give both East and West 0 to 37 HCP, and really let the chips fall where they may—just like in real life. Doing so will give you sets of deals wherein the notrump contract in N/S is less certain, and the hold-up play is less and less certain—perfect for situational study and practice.
Happy dealing!