Just because you have opening values, doesn’t mean you need to bid.

The first problem presented in this hand is the fact that North has an opening hand, but they are *robbed* of the opportunity to open the bidding. Instead, West opens in front of them (now what they should open may be a matter of discussion as well but for the sake of this hand, I chose for them to open 1♠)

Now, what’s important to note here is that just because we have opening values, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we have the values to bid in a competitive auction. With this hand, we only have 13 HCP — we don’t have shortness in the opponents suit, and our only 5 card suit is clubs with ♣QTxxx — which is certainly not a good enough quality suit to warrant a vulnerable 2-Level overcall.

So here we choose to pass.

So now, the question is how do we tackle the hand. Well — here we have our 5 card suit we eschewed in the bidding, but we’re happy to lead it against a suit contract. For this hand, we led fourth best, ♣6.

One thought we have here is that this diamond suit looks awfully appealing for our opponents to set up, we want to take away their ability to utilize these diamonds for pitches. So, we do not take the easy road, instead we duck the first diamond and win the second. If West still has one more diamond, there’s not much we can do, but if they don’t… now we’re good to go.

Now we have to think of our next plan of attack. And looking at this hand, it looks like we’re hoping our partner is not completely broke — but instead maybe has something in hearts. We’re fairly certain that they don’t have the ♣K because otherwise, they likely would have played that at T1 (third hand high). So we play the ♥K, hoping partner has the ♥A and that we’ll be able to score a ruff.

Would you have tackled this hand the same way? Let me know in the comments!