Blum on Bridge Control Yourself Part II
	Most of the time declarer, before reaping his profits, must sow the seeds to establish the crop from whence those profits come. A bit biblical perhaps, but if it helps to prove a point, let it be. We found last week never to surrender control of a suit without good reason for so doing. At the same time when you are not crowded for time we also learned not to be afraid to lose the lead by letting an opponent win tricks which are his anyway. On the other hand, when the opponent, on obtaining the lead, may be able to cash enough established tricks to defeat your contract, try to keep the lead while doing the best you can with whatever winners you have left. Today we shall add a third element to control and timing: suit establishment. Regardless of whether the declarer is in a suit or no-trump contract much of the time, he will have to establish at least one suit in order to fulfill his contract. In part one we established a suit of KQJ10 by knocking out the ace while we still had controls (stoppers). Another common avenue toward suit establishment is via the finesse. An excellent example is described in my bridge bible, Watson's "Play of the Hand at Bridge," where he uses a double finesse to establish the diamond suit in the following hand. You, as declarer, hold K753-A642-432-AK opposite a dummy of A6-K5-AQ1085-7632 in a contract of 4NT against which LHO opens the club queen. Your only sure tricks are the aces and kings in spades, hearts and clubs plus the diamond ace for a total of only seven winners. It should not be difficult to see that additional possibilities must be found in the diamond suit, even though two honors are out against you. You may lose a trick to each of them or to neither, but you must take the chance to have any hope of winning. From our previous discussion about timing we learned not to cash our sure winners first, possibly giving up control of the hand, before we established additional tricks. So we must immediately lead a low diamond toward the AQ tenace. (A tenace is simply two cards with the middle card missing). Assuming LHO plays low, the proper card to play from dummy is the 10. Let us also assume it loses to the jack and another club is returned to your last club stopper. You must now play a second diamond to the queen in the hope that LHO holds the king. Let's say it holds as LHO has K96 and RHO holds the J7. This secures your contract of 4NT because of establishing three diamond winners to add to the seven sure tricks originally held. At this point I wish to digress and talk about the double finesse. I'm often surprised that a number of good players do not fully comprehend this rather simple execution. Suppose you had finessed the queen instead of the 10 against the above defensive holding. You would win the queen, play the ace dropping the jack and give up a trick to the king. The final result would be the same as first finessing the 10, the loss of one trick. What difference does it make? Finessing the 10 first gives you the opportunity to win all five tricks if both the jack and king are with LHO. Also if the king were with RHO and the jack with LHO you would lose to only the king and garner four tricks. To finesse the queen first gains nothing and costs you all hope of making five diamond tricks. The number of diamonds you hold makes a difference though. When you hold eight diamonds against the opponents five, it is best to finesse the 10. However, if you are lucky enough to hold nine diamonds against the enemies' four, you must bare in mind those adverse diamonds may be evenly divided 2-2. As a result, with no information to the contrary, the better play is to finesse the queen then play the ace dropping the king. Declarer must bear in mind that the three elements of control, timing and suit establishment are woven through virtually every hand and if not taken seriously will give the enemy an insurmountable advantage.