Oh Captain, My Captain — by Greg Coles

Another thing that the 4-4 fit has going for it is the flexibility in deciding which of the two hands (Declarer's or Dummy's) that you wish to make "the captain".

Look at this slam played recently where Declarer had many options as to how to play the hand due to the flexibility of the 4-4 heart fit.

	A 5 A 9 7 2 A 6 3 A Q 8 3
N-S Vul	Q 10 9 7 6 K Q J 4 K 9 K 2

West Pass Pass Pass

North 2 4 NT¹ 6

East Pass Pass Pass All Pass

South 1 2 5 ²

1. RKC 1430 for hearts
2. One or four key cards

6 by South

Trick 1. W

Lead 2

Regardless of what the remainder of your plan may be, it is a good idea to call for a low spade from dummy on the opening trick. There are two reasons for this; on a good day West may have under led the K taking care of your spade loser or more realistically when East plays the K on the first trick your Q will be set up as a winner.

So as expected after playing the 5 from dummy on the first trick, East plays the king. Before automatically following with a low spade from hand it is now time to stop and make a plan.

We are in a suit contract, so the correct thing to do is to count losers. This is where deciding which hand to make captain comes into play, because we only count the losers in one of the two hands. Assuming we were to make South the captain, all of our losers are taken care of by winners in the north hand except for spades. After losing the first trick we now have four spades left including the good Q. Dummy has the ace of spades, which takes care of one of the three remaining losers and dummy also has a good club that we can pitch a spade on, but we are still left with one more spade loser. The only way to get rid of this loser is to trump it in dummy (unless of course we're lucky enough that the outstanding spades split 3-3, then it won't be a loser after all). This isn't a problem except that if the missing trumps divide 4-1 we will have to trump the long spade before pulling all of the outstanding trumps. This would mean that we would be trumping the third round of spades in dummy and we could leave ourselves vulnerable to a defensive over-ruff. Picture East starting with K4 and T865 - our plan would fail.

Now let's go through the same exercise but this time making North's hand the captain. After losing the opening trick North's only losers are in the minors. Of the four small minor cards that North possesses, two are looked after by Declarer's minor suit kings and a third can be discarded on Declarer's good Q, leaving us once again with one card that needs to be ruffed. The plan should be to ruff a small diamond not a small club. Similarly to the theoretical problem that could arise in the first scenario there is also a possibility of a defensive ruff when we play clubs. There is also of course a chance that the defense could over-ruff when Declarer is attempting to ruff a diamond too, but since declarer has only 5 diamonds the chance of one defender having two or less is quite small.

So, we have our plan. We've thought it all through carefully and we've decided to make North's hand the captain. We have figured out what suit to play for a ruff in case trumps divide 4-1 and we are now ready play to trick one. After winning the return, we start by cashing the K followed by the Q and as it turns out both defenders follow both rounds. We now know that our careful planning really wasn't necessary - we can make either hand the captain. Does this mean that all of this planning was a waste of time? No, of course not. We know that missing five cards they will divide 4-1 over 28% of the time and we were prepared for it. We played the hand well, and the satisfaction garnered from that is really why most of us play the game.

The full hand and play:

	A 5 A 9 7 2 A 6 3 A Q 8 3
J 8 3 2 8 6 3 Q J 8 10 7 6		K 4 10 5 10 7 5 4 2 J 9 5 4
	Q 10 9 7 6 K Q J 4 K 9 K 2

Trick 1. W 2. E 3. S 4. S 5. S 6. N 7. N 8. S 9. S 10. N

Lead 2 4 K Q 4 A 3 Q 9 6

2nd 5 K 3 6 8 4 4 8 J 10

3rd K 6 2 7 A 7 K 8 A J

4th 6 3 5 10 2 3 8 5 7 Q

Declarer claims the last three tricks with Dummy's AQ and 9.