The Video Transcript:

You have times that you can shoot the moon, and there’s times that you shouldn’t, particularly if you’re playing against good players. Okay, we showed a hand earlier that you had Rip City and hearts ace king queen jack ten nine queen of spades in your hand. You take the queen of spades and you blow the hand out. There’s others where you had good side suits. Let’s look at this particular illustrative hand here.

Okay, the pass is complete, and you’re on lead, and you have ideas, maybe, maybe, maybe you got some killer diamonds. You’ve got, um, two middle spades and a singleton or stiff heart, and you get ideas of shooting, especially if it goes deuce of clubs, um, king of clubs, and you say, “Wow, that just about sets that suit up,” and you throw that off, and maybe they lead spades a couple of times, right, and they both go through, and now you say, “Hmm, what shall I do?”

Well, um, if you honestly think you’re going to get this moon past good players, don’t even think about it. Even if you had completely safe diamonds, um, you know, you could give you the goose and five instead of the nine, you know, even if you had completely saved diamonds, there’s no way to hope for the moon here, because if you lead a club and a heart comes down, right, do you think you’re going to get that through? Probably not, because they’ll go ahead and stop it, and then they could throw you in with a club, and you could eat the queen that way. And if you try to take the diamonds down from the top, three leads will pick up that whole suit, and you’ll be stuck with this in the same problem. You put a heart on the table, somebody will stop, and by that time you’ve eaten a queen, and you’ve taken in about 18 points. So don’t go for the moon if you have a losing heart. It just will not work. Otherwise, if you have it off the top, go for it.