Sac and squeeze

The very first board of the very first match in a GNT game, we are playing one of the strongest pairs in the room. I pick up:

W

Me

♠

AJ9xxxx

♥

AJx

♦

x

♣

xx

And the bidding goes:

W

Me

N

North

E

East

S

South

—

—

—

1♣

1♠

Dbl

2♠

Pass

3♠

5♣

Pass

Pass

?

Do you agree with my bidding so far?  What's your bid?

From my point of view, 5C is making.  Is 5S a worthwhile sacrifice?

The best case scenario is that partner has Kxx of spades and shortness in hearts. In that case, I go down 1.  The worst case is that partner has KQx of spades and nothing else. I then go down 3. I rolled the dice and bid 5S, got doubled and went down ... five!  Turns out that the real worst case scenario is that partner raised with 10xx xxx Qxxxx Qx.

Needless to say, we lost that match.  But only by 7 imps.  Without my ill-advised sacrifice, we would have won.

We lost the next match too and found ourselves in a round-robin with two other two-loss teams.  "Why are they here?," sputtered our opponent to the director who patiently explained that the reason he had play us in the round robin was because we had lost our first two matches.  "I don't want to be here either," I mollified him, "I would rather be playing there."

Our opponent had just about settled down when this hand came up (I was West):

Once North  put in the King diamonds, I realized that I could squeeze South out of his king of spades. If the finesse worked, in other words, I didn't need to take it.  North, the danger hand, with his established hearts would be kept off lead ...  Here's the full hand (click Next to follow the play)



He wasn't happy about that either.  Playing in the last round of a Swiss teams having lost all your matches, you should not be subjected to a squeeze.

We ended up blitzing the round robin and ended up fifth. Not bad, but I had hoped to do better.