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Introduction to the Veering Squeeze Card
This article is excerpted from Ruff or Sluff which appeared in the March 2009 issue of The Bridge World and is reprinted by permission. Copyright 2009-2026 Bridge World Magazine, Inc. For information about The Bridge World, visit www.bridgeworld.com
Brian Lee and Walter Lee introduced me to the theme of the veering squeeze card, a technique that can be used to compensate for the absence of one of the usual requirements in some types of strip-squeeze. In these positions, the squeeze card is a loser that, after being led, veers in one direction or another depending on second hand’s discard: Sometimes declarer will ruff; sometimes he will discard and allow fourth hand to win the trick.
The first such squeeze that I encountered was one involving overcoming a missing entry, where the veering squeeze card can serve as a stepping-stone. Here is an example:
1
1a
If the closed hand now had a spade instead of one of those diamonds (or if the opening lead had been in any other suit), you could cross to dummy in diamonds, cash the club king, ruff a club back to hand, and take your last trump. East would be strip-squeezed down to only one diamond winner, so you could throw him in and take the last two tricks in spades. With dummy cut off, that strip-squeeze fails—East can prevail by unguarding spades.
If you were willing to play East for a particular shape in the minors, you could alternatively cash all of your trumps, the diamond ace, and the club king and (unless the spades are good) exit with whichever minor-suit loser you preserved. However, that would run the risk of keeping the wrong minor-suit loser in dummy.
Instead, taking the spade lie as given, there is a sure-trick line that caters to all minor-suit distributions and, in the given layout, exploits a veering squeeze card: Cash a trump, pitching a diamond from dummy (East sheds a diamond), then cross to the diamond ace and take the club king, leaving:
1b
Now (unless East showed out on the club king, in which case a diamond play assures the contract) play dummy’s last club. If East pitches a diamond, ruff and then throw East in with a diamond; if East pitches a spade, sluff a diamond, forcing West to give dummy two spade tricks. Should East follow to the fourth club, he has already been (triple) squeezed out of a long diamond, and he can be thrown in with a diamond (West will have been stripped of his singleton diamond). Indeed, a triple squeeze is a more common remedy for a broken strip-squeeze.
The simpler positions involving a veering squeeze card feature the possibility of the squeezee’s partner’s being thrown in to lead a particular suit (spades in the previous deal). This may be necessary because declarer is void, or in the wrong hand, or needs to preserve a trump for control or for a late entry. These variants share the following requirements:
1. The squeeze card is a loser led toward the last trump and through the squeeze victim. Where a normal strip-squeeze is automatic (functioning against either opponent), a veering squeeze is inherently positional.
2. Strip squeezes always have at least one menace that is either extended (i.e., if it is unguarded, a trick can be established by losing a trick in its suit after the squeeze) or can be used as a throw-in card against the squeezee once he has been stripped of excess winners. A veering squeeze must contain such a menace, typically in the hand with the trump opposite the squeeze card. Another menace (which may be any of many types) must be in the opposite hand — that is, with the squeeze card.
3. In order for veering to work, the unsqueezed defender must have a singleton master card in the squeeze-card suit and all other cards in the suit that declarer needs led (normally, this is the suit of the menace in the hand with the squeeze card). Generally, none of the unsqueezed defender’s cards in this “lead-needed” suit can be high enough to take an active role in the play. This is a very restrictive requirement and one of the main reasons that so few veering squeeze cards appear in practice.