Here was the original problem:
West leads the 6♦️. You play the 10♦️ from dummy and East plays the 7♦️. You can now count twelve top tricks—six ♣️s, three ♦️s, two ♥️s, and one ♠️. What is your play for the thirteenth trick?
Solution–
With only one loser it’s time to look for a squeeze. Our only threat cards are in ♠️s and ♥️s. Rather than worrying about whether the squeeze is there or not–let’s just play for it. [Even if a squeeze is not on, playing for it often works because the opponents think they are squeezed and they make a mistake.]
At first glance it looks like our threat cards are 9 ♥️ and J ♠️. The J ♠️ is a problem because Dummy might get squeezed before East. Here is what might be the ending of our squeeze attempt:
In this case when South leads his/her last ♣️ winner, North is squeezed before East. On this trick East discards the same suit as Dummy and East then wins the 13th trick. The solution to this dilemma is to cash the A ♠️ before starting the squeeze and use South’s 10 ♠️ as the spade threat. That way when the squeeze card is played, North can let go all of her/his ♠️s and declarer will still have a ♠️ threat in the South hand.
Here is the ending we want for our squeeze:
This time when South cashes his/her last two ♣️ winners, North can discard ♠️s on both tricks, but East cannot. East must choose between protecting ♠️s or ♥️s. No matter what East chooses to do, declarer will end up with the 13th trick.
Here was the entire deal:
Even if West had the Q♠️, East is still likely to hang onto her/his K♠️ and discard down to two ♥️s. As a general rule you cannot squeeze an opponent without at least one threat in the upper hand. This play of unblocking a high card to transfer the threat to the other hand is called the Vienna Coup. [The image for this post is an AI depiction of the 1934 Austrian Coup.]
[For more bridge quizzes click on Bridge Index page.]
