A tight fit
Janet de Botton
Squeezes have always been as incomprehensible to me as the off-side rule. Having tried to understand them for years I began to doubt their existence — were they simply invented by men as an excuse for discarding the wrong card in the endgame?
Last week we were in Biarritz playing their fabulous bridge congress when this hand occurred in the teams’ tournament. Was it going to turn me into a squeezaholic like the rest of the boys?
I was playing with David Burn and raised myself to six spades because I was having a great time and I felt lucky.
West led a heart to my Ace and I counted 11 tricks. I had no alternative but to try for the dreaded squeeze possibility, silently muttering the three rules I’d formulated for the big occasion: run your long suit, keep ’em guessing and believe it will work. Of course, I wanted to discard my heart on the ◆A as soon as possible, but that would have given away too much information, so I ran seven spades instead. With five cards remaining I’d kept ◆A 10 9, and ♣A 6 in dummy. East, a world famous pro, didn’t seem to enjoy discarding at all. He did what you should do in these situations and kept length with dummy’s diamonds, coming down to ♣K Q and ◆K Q J. A club to the Ace brought down the ♣Q. Now I discarded my heart on the ◆A and a club towards hand set up my 12th trick.
‘I was squeezed,’ said the pro, with a shrug. He wasn’t, of course, but he may have been ever so slightly off-side.
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