Steve Raine, a British tournament bridge player, runs a YouTube channel reporting on some of the biggest events. He also creates interview videos for BridgeBaseOnline, named “Table Talks.”
Today’s deal is from one such chat with English international Ben Norton. When Raine bid four no-trump as North, it was a quantitative invite to slam. Norton optimistically essayed six diamonds, receiving a heart lead.
Norton won in hand and then cashed the diamond ace and king, intending to play three rounds of trumps. When the queen dropped from West, declarer changed horses, seeking to organize a trump coup against East’s remaining J-9.
In order to take three ruffs and reach trump parity with East, Norton crossed to the spade ace and ruffed a spade before crossing to dummy in hearts to ruff another spade. East shed a heart on that, so Norton reentered dummy in hearts next, to ruff a third spade in hand. All that remained was to take the club king and ace and then lead a plain-suit card through East at trick 12 to secure the slam-going trick with the diamond 10.
Had East thrown a club instead of a heart on the third spade, declarer would have taken the club king and ace first, using the third heart as the late entry to dummy instead.
This line was not terribly risky. If diamonds were 3-3 after all, West must have had Q-J-x, as he would not have dropped the queen from Q-9-x. In that case, if he were able to overruff South, it would be with the jack, not the nine.