3NT

[Hanoi5]

♠KJx

♥QJx

♦JT8xx

♣xx

 

♠ATxx

♥Kxx

♦AKx

♣KTx

 

You reach 3NT and receive a club lead to the Ace and a club return. You insert the Ten and lose to the Jack and another club comes back to a heart from dummy and your king. On the ♦A only small cards appear.

 

LHO led ♣5, won the Jack and returned the 6; you can count on her not to be brilliant, she's the client. RHO won the Ace returned the 2 and played the 3, he's the pro.

[rbforster]

If you trust the client's 4th best lead, you've got 3 clubs and a heart loser coming (I assume we have the 4♣ as one of our spots?). It doesn't seem to hurt to give up the heart ace and hope for an endplay after they cash their club but I feel like both hands are getting squeezed to where if they return a spade we will still need the diamonds to come in. If we're going to just try to run our tricks, diamonds seems better than spades for finding Qxx on.

 

How about spade to the K, run the J♦ (down if it fails), and if the Q doesn't fall 3rd, we're down too. We could delay the cashing the 3rd diamond after the finesse succeeds and set up our hearts, but I think with good defense we'll just end up screwing up communications when the diamonds might have been good.

[Fluffy]

An interesting line is to play hearts now, and later play for dropping ♦Q doubleton or else try for 4 spade trick, sadly dummy will be squeezed a lot before we can have both lines avaible (a perfect defence would get ♥A on second round, play clubs and then a heart, dummy being unable to pitch 3 times)

 

I think the best line then is to bank all on diamond finese if ♥Q holds.

[gnasher]

An interesting line is to play hearts now, and later play for dropping ♦Q doubleton or else try for 4 spade trick, sadly dummy will be squeezed a lot before we can have both lines avaible (a perfect defence would get ♥A on second round, play clubs and then a heart, dummy being unable to pitch 3 times)

We can still play that line: 3 rounds of clubs throwing a diamond, ♥Q, ♥J to the ace, club on which we throw the small heart, heart on which we throw ♠J. After cashing ♦AK without success, we play RHO for ♠Qxx.

 

That also gains when LHO is 4234 with ♠Q, assuming he has ♣Q (which is likely from trick one). They can't both cash the club and make me take the third heart prematurely, so we can cash ♦AK first, then play the heart winner, squeezing LHO.