This deal comes from many years ago. I write about it because a similar hand came up at X-Clubs and
I asked a panel of club players how they would play the trump suit when they held AQJ962 in hand and
the singleton 5 in dummy. There were different answers and quite a bit of statistical analyis but it
seems the play that would yield the best result (by a very small margin) is to lead the 5 and finesse the
9. I was asked this question and said my gut feel was to finesse the nine: if the ten was with East and
the nine forced the king I would make the rest of the spades unless there was a very bad break. I am not
great with statistics but it seems that AI says that finessing the NINE would result in five tricks 48.44%
of the time, finessing the queen or jack 37.50% of the time, and simply playing the ace followed by the
queen would yield five tricks 35.94% of the time. But in the back of my mind was the question of
whether the first card that East played should make any difference. It brought back vague memories of
a very similar hand I wrote about years ago:

Dealer W NS Vul

	5 AQ AKJ42 A6532
T743 KJ QT9 KQJ7		K8 T6532 8765 84
	AQJ962 9874 3 J2

Angela sent Vil this problem which came from Tuesday 12/05/26 at X-Clubs

Hi, just one question for now, match points. All vul, dealer West who
passes. Your partner, North, opens 1D and East passes. What do you bid, holding

AQJ

Q9

AT732

J42

This is the final deal I want to review from the session on Friday 17/04/26 where, once more, the game
force 1NT was very effective and the result could have been great but only if you were Deep Finesse

Board 25. Dealer N EW Vul

	AKJ75 T2 J9 K652
9432 85 K762 T93		Q86 KJ63 T5 Q874
	T AQ974 AQ843 AJ

One of the deadly sins in bridge is to overbid to a minor suit game when nine tricks are easily
available in No Trumps. But a bigger sin, in my opinion, is to choose an unmakeable 3NT when
a minor suit slam is a much better proposition

This deal comes from X-Clubs, Tuesday 14/4/2026. It is an EW hand where most EW pairs chose the
impossible 3NT when a minor suit slam was a much better proposition, and just bidding the minor suit
game would have scored over 90%. Let’s take a look at the EW hands and see how we might bid them

Board 16. Dealer East, Nil Vulnerable.

A85 A72 J92 K832

KJ72 KQT854 AJ9

Non Forcing Responses to One of a suit openings:
All responses other than 1NT are non forcing. Often when partner opens 1H or 1S it is necessary to
raise with only a three card suit if you don’t want to force to game. That is why I prefer to play ‘five
card majors’
Normal suit responses to 1 level openings: