Queen's Gambit

[rod]

The Coffs Harbour club held its annual Anniversary Teams event yesterday. This celebrates the anniversary of the club's founding. Your teammates are assigned to you in a way designed to mix experienced with novice and inexperienced players. Three sets of eight or ten boards are played and in each set you play with a different teammate. It's a fun and social event as long as you maintain your sense of humor!

On Board 10 I found myself declaring a vulnerable 3NT contract with no opposing bidding.

♠ K987
♥ --
♦ AQ8763
♣ Q86

♠ Q2
♥ AKQ103
♦ J54
♣ 1053

The ♠3 was led, 7 from dummy, 4 from RHO. Now what?

I could overtake in hand, cash my three hearts and hope for a very lucky lie of the diamonds. But that seems a poor percentage; if the diamonds don't run then I'll lose a spade, heart, diamond, two clubs and a few other black cards depending on what was discarded from dummy on the hearts. The vulnerable set would be severe.

Another thought is to cash only two top hearts before attacking diamonds; however dummy cannot afford even two discards.

It seems best to give up a diamond right away and hope they can't or don't take three or more clubs. But I will still need an entry to my hand to cash the hearts.

Do you see where I'm going with this? I let dummy's ♠7 hold and called for the ♦Q from dummy.

Opponents held:

♠ J1053
♥ 954
♦ K109
♣ KJ4

♠ A64
♥ J8762
♦ 2
♣ A972

Now in a high-level event LHO might have looked askance at this unusual play and ducked, and I would be in trouble. But that was not the case here. LHO won and when the smoke cleared I had 10 tricks.