K10753 
6532
964 
3
K10753 6532
964 3
Not a very nice hand to start the match with! It looked even more terrible after the following bidding...
| West - Pass Pass Dbl | North 2 *2NT 3 4
| East pass pass Pass Dbl | South 2 * 3 3 All pass |
(Two diamonds showed a strong hand, but not game forcing. Two hearts was a relay and the rest was natural with three clubs being Stayman.)
... and the following dummy that was tabled by my partner:
A9 A84
AKJ AK1072
Ouch! That didn't look great. First of all there were a lot of trump losers. Secondly, the lead of a high spot card in diamonds indicated that the queen of diamonds was probably offside.
To overcome a 4-2 break in the trump suit, I took the diamond ace and led a small heart from dummy. East thought a while, and finally went up with the queen. (A costly mistake as we will see later.) She returned a spade for the jack and ace.
Now I played the ace, king of clubs, and trumped a club. Everyone followed, which meant that the outstanding clubs were 4-3. I crossed to dummy with the heart ace, extracting the last trump from a possible doubleton trump with the opponents, and trumped another club.
I continued with the spade king. East could trump this, but she could only make her trumps because she had to play a diamond in the KJ tenace. The full layout was as follows:
N-S Vul
| A 9 A 8 4 A K J A K 10 7 2
| |
| Q J 8 6 2 J 9 10 8 2 Q 8
| ![[W - E]](t.gif)
| 4 K Q 10 7 Q 7 5 3 J 9 8 4
|
| K 10 7 5 3 6 5 3 2 9 6 4 3 |
Four hearts doubled made with one of the worst trump fits I have ever played!
I had the hand analysed later with the help of my computer which showed that the hand can only be defeated with an initial diamond lead by west. Then the first heart has to be ducked by east and won by west for another diamond lead. Of course four hearts played by north cannot be defeated.