Marshmallow Temptation

A bridge-playing friend of mine has a derogatory term for bad players; he calls them marshmallows.

But be careful; sometimes the marshmallows can tempt you.

East thinks for a long time on opening lead and finally leads the ♠A.  West plays the ♠9.  East continues with ♠Q to my ♠K, East following suit.

Seems pretty clear from the auction hesitation and play that spades are 7-2.

I play two high clubs and everyone follows suit.  On three more clubs, West discards the ♦9 and two small hearts.  Meanwhile East throws one of each red suit and one spade.  Now I play three high hearts. East can follow suit only once, while West follows to all three hearts.

The hand is now completely counted out, assuming I have read the spade suit correctly.  East is 7=2=2=2 and West is 2=5=4=2.  I have reached this three card end position, having lost one spade, and won one spade, five clubs, and three hearts.  East is down to two spades and a diamond and West is down to all diamonds.

What to do?

If West’s three diamonds include both high honors, I can lead a diamond to dummy’s JT and endplay her for a neat eleventh trick.  But if East’s one diamond is an honor, a small diamond will lose to his honor and he will claim with good spades, holding me to nine tricks.

I think the matchpoint choice is pretty clear, and that is not to risk settling for only nine tricks.  I can think of at least three reasons for that:

• The marshmallow sitting East is much more likely to be retaining a high diamond than a small diamond that he could have earlier pitched.
• If the marshmallow sitting East had tried to get his partner on lead in order to lead through my ♠K, I would be sitting one trick worse than I am now.  I am also a tempo ahead because East chose to lead ♠A and then ♠Q, rather than leading the ♠Q at Trick 1.
• If I had not upgraded my hand to open 2NT, and had instead opened 1♣ (as I expect the field to have done), a spade preempt by East would have put my partner in a pickle and it is possible that we would not have rested in 3NT to begin with.  (Note that the opponents have six spades and a diamond trick and so even 3♠X would be a productive vul save against 3NT.)

Accordingly, I led the ♦A and a small diamond.

And I was wrong!  The whole hand was:

Still, I was right in a sense not to be tempted by the marshmallow, since +630 was 9.86 factored mps on a 10.95 top.  And +660 would have been the 10.95, a gain of only 1 plus a fraction.