My First Compound Squeeze

by David Stevenson

I was South on this hand

West	North	East	South
			1
P	1	P	2NT
P	3 (a)	P	3NT (b)
P	P	P
(a) Tell me about your majors
(b) Denies 3s and 4s

KQ864 A53 J7 Q74

A9 Q6 A82 AKJ985

First trick, playing 4th highest leads from an honour, 2nd from small cards (standard British):

4 3 J Q

Now make 13 tricks. Of course we should be in 6 but first I play hands to the best of my ability, and only then do I whinge about the bidding!

You have 12 tricks, obviously 13 if s break 3-3. It seems 13 needs a squeeze otherwise. If s are 6-2 or 7-1 you have a menace there but no-one bid s and the lead has to be a false card - very unlikely. A 7-1 break in s means you have a possible / squeeze but it also means that a player has not bid with 7s and 4s! This all seems very poor odds. You have a positional simple squeeze against West only if she has KQ and 4s, a bit more likely.

About 50 years ago I read a book by Clyde E Love called Bridge Squeezes Complete and it simplified Double Squeezes for me. I have never seen any other classification that works so well. I have explained the classification here.

However a double squeeze here was unlikely because it needed only one person guarding s, or only one guarding s, very unlikely as explained above.

But the real interest in the book was on Compound Squeezes. In a Compound Squeeze you have two B menaces, that is a menace accompanied by an entry against both opponents. In this case that would be the 5 and 8. You also have to have a single menace sitting over the opponent threatened. Suppose West had 4s then this is the case. You also need one menace in one hand, two in the other, ok.

In my 50 years I have never done a Compound Squeeze deliberately and successfully. There were a couple of hands which afterwards I did think I may have done one by accident. So when I saw this dummy ...

This was a Type L restricted Compound Squeeze. It requires the suit with no menaces (the ‘free’ suit) to be South (s) and requires North to have an entry in either s or s (Q) and South to have an entry in either s or s (A). Excellent! So now I cash 5 rounds of s discarding 7 and 4 from dummy and West is triple squeezed. Her last 7 cards must include 4s so she cannot keep 2 cards in both red suits. But now I have to decide which red suit she has abandoned.

KQ86 A5 J --

A9 6 A82 5

If she has abandoned s then I cash 3 rounds of s discarding a , to the A, , West has to discard a , discard from dummy and East is squeezed in the reds.

If she has abandoned s then to the A, to the ace, , West has to discard a , discard from dummy, Q, K and East is squeezed in the reds.

In fact West had followed to 1 and discarded 2, 8, 4 and T so I decided she had abandoned s so followed the second line for 13 tricks.

The E/W hands were

J752 KT842 K64 6

T3 J97 QT953 T32

The classification of Compound Squeezes (slightly amended and improved from Love) is here.

Editor's note:

• If you want to comment on this article, why not write direct to me, David Stevenson? I shall be pleased to hear from you!

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