|
Ruffing -
In the basic ruffing tactic, the declarer
plays the side suit, perhaps several times by regaining the lead
in declarer’s hand, making good use of the dummy trumps to ruff
losers. Using the basic ruff makes sense when the dummy’s main
feature is a short suit opposite declarer’s losers in the
respective suit.
Imagine West leads the Heart Ace, takes a quick look at the
dummy and switches to a trump on trick two. Opponents are on the
right track, trying to minimize dummy ruffing power. On this
hand, we clearly are best ruffing two of the remaining three
Heart losers using dummy’s two trump. We have plenty of Diamond
entries back to the declarer’s hand and continue ruffing. Doing
so, we lose 1 Club and 2 Hearts. Should we mistakenly draw trump
immediately (opponents are usually 3-1 or 2-2 with four
(outstanding cards), we end up losing four Hearts and at least
one Club. What a difference! But let’s say you aren’t blessed
with a 5-3 trump fit. Even with a 5-2 fit, our ruffing
tactic may be still be the best bet.
West leads the Heart King to our Ace. If we draw trump we
would ultimately lose three Heart tricks. And similar to the
prior hand, we begin by ruffing the second Heart, come back to
our hand with the Diamond Ace (not the long Club suit). Now we
can ruff a second Heart with the remaining trump in dummy. Now
is the time to draw the opponents’ trump. Using the ruffing
strategy, we could make 12 tricks, a small slam, while we only
make 10 tricks if we initially pull trump instead of ruffing.
On hands like the two above, our path was clear. The declarer
never really had any other tactics, promotion or finessing, to
develop extra tricks. Now let’s try a variation that is a bit
trickier.
West leads the Club King, won by your Ace. You cash your
Heart Ace and ruff a Heart in dummy. With both your Aces gone,
what next? That depends! Did you ruff in the dummy with the 2 or
a top honor? If you planned ahead and ruffed with either the Ace
or King, you’ve learned to plan ahead and appreciate the
importance of transportation! Doing so, you could then play the
Spade 2 and overtake the trump in your hand, providing a
valuable entry to allow a second ruff in the dummy. After all,
your side has all the top trumps so it wasn’t wasteful to ruff
with a high trump. There is no getting around losing two Club
and one or two Diamonds, depending of whether the Diamond
finesse wins (if West holds the Diamond Ace). However we would
like to avoid losing even one Heart trick if possible. Here the
key point is, consider entries in addition to the ruffing in
dummy.
For our last hand, we will only have a 4-4 trump fit. Could a ruffing
tactic be successful?
East leads the Diamond Queen – we can see this hand requires
some planning. From the declarer’s perspective, the losers might
be one Spade, two Hearts, one Diamond, and two Clubs – totaling
six losers. If the contract was 4 Spades, we need to hold our
losers to three tricks. Again, ruffing in the dummy short suit
provides a winning strategy. However, this time we can afford to
first play two rounds of trump just in case South has a
singleton Diamond (see Rule of 1). And
since we have all the top honor entries to get to our declarer
hand, there’s no worry that an opponent will get in and lead a
trump to reduce dummy’s ruffing power. So after drawing two
rounds of trump, we win the Diamond Ace, cash the Club Ace, and
ruff a Club. Now back to our declarer hand playing a low Heart
to the Heart King and ruff the remaining Club in our hand. Next
we play the Diamond King and a third Diamond – assuming the
opponents’ Diamonds are 3- 2, we are okay losing either a
Diamond trick and a Spade or two Diamonds if opponent wishes to
use their last trump in that manner. So if all works well, we
lose one Heart, one Spade, and one Diamond – nicely done.
|
K Q 7 6 5 4