[thepossum]

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From the latest Ken Berg memorial. Sadly I missed the overtrick

The winning play was of course to lead the king then small. How did people know?

I am just wondering if that is a basic play I should know

[P_Marlowe]

Hi,

I would say, that since you are missing the 9, the natural way
of finessing the Q is King, followed low to J/T.

If you have the 9 instead of the 8, you could argue, that it
is the same, it would be, but still playing King followed by
low to the J/T still looks more natural.

I dont think there is a huge difference, which way to go, except
success.

You could also try to get some interference out of the opening
lead, but given that we are talking about handling the trump suit,
it seems risky.


With kind regards
Marlowe

[thepossum]

P_Marlowe, on 2025-November-11, 03:52, said:

Hi,

I would say, that since you are missing the 9, the natural way
of finessing the Q is King, followed low to J/T.

If you have the 9 instead of the 8, you could argue, that it
is the same, it would be, but still playing King followed by
low to the J/T still looks more natural.

I dont think there is a huge difference, which way to go, except
success.

You could also try to get some interference out of the opening
lead, but given that we are talking about handling the trump suit,
it seems risky.


With kind regards
Marlowe

Thanks. I have looked at it over and over and the majority play was the King then small - but I never base anything on confirmation bias. At least I played one high honour to cover the singleton Queen possibility. I would be curious at the probabilities. Next time I will play the high honour first and it will be the other way. Maybe I should test it with a DD analyser and see which way it goes. I did not manage much inference from the auction or lead and thought it was too risky in a slam to do anything else first

EDIT I did just try it through one Bridge analysis and it shows the percentage slightly higher for the way I did it. Not sure why. Not much difference. I certainly cannot assess which is correct though. Beyond my experience. In fact out of three possible leads, King, 8 or small, Small was top, closely followed by 8, and slightly last was King.

I could try and learn from the result, the larger number of people who played the Kinng first and the expert advice above - I'm not much of one for probability plays that close. I often play randomly on the drop with 4 trumps out too - gut feel - the risk of great surprise or upset from partner

I just remember a while back simulating some simple distributions and being surprised how many samples until you got anywhere close to theory

[Stephen Tu]

It's a tossup where the Q is, because you have no clues from the bidding or some severe suit break showing up from the lead. On 3-2 breaks you'll breakeven either way in the long run. But the best play is K first, because you can pick up Q9xx on your right, but not Q9xx on your left. Over the long run you'll profit making 7 when it's Q9xx on the right. It also allows you to make when Q fifth is on your right.

You play the K first, not low to the J, because having decided to play E for the Q, you want to get the freebie of picking off the singleton Q with west without loss, by playing K first.

You can't really use double dummy analysis to analyze this because double dummy knows where the Q is. You have to analyze it in a single dummy manner and just assume you are guessing the Q only 50%. Since it's a tossup, you go the way that you can pick up the 4-1 break.