BRIDGE

Trumps can have useful purposes other than simply ruffing losers — as today’s declarer learned too late to do him any good!

Good spade fit, several quick tricks and some extra honour cards that could be established — all of the ingredients for a successful contract as long as the timing (what to do and when to do it) was good. It wasn’t!

Declarer covered the lead of the diamond ten with dummy’s Jack only to have East’s Queen force the play of a high honour from the closed hand.

Three rounds of spades ending in dummy extracted the lurkers and then South set about establishing heart winners by leading dummy’s Jack.

Good move by West as he could see no particular advantage in winning his ace, so he ducked and won the continuation to South’s Queen to play back a second round of diamonds to force out declarer’s last high card in the suit.

South then cashed his heart winner to pitch dummy’s losing diamond before finally recognizing he’d need to set up a club winner to get his total trick yield to ten.

But when he led a club to the dummy’s Jack, East won the King and found the very effective counter of playing back a third round of diamonds to force dummy to ruff — and give up two club tricks by having to lead away from dummy’s last honour in the suit for want of a hand entry to lead toward dummy.

An entry that would have been available by way of a third round of trumps if only South had ceased and desisted with trump plays after two rounds had been drawn!