Do you ruff low, middle or high?

Patrick Young, a Scottish scholar and librarian who died in 1652, wrote, “The trouble with weather forecasting is that it’s right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.”

The trouble with advice in bridge books and newspaper columns is that it is right almost all of the time, but there are always exceptions to the rules, which is why bridge has retained its popularity.

For example, sometimes in a trump contract, your initial problem isn’t when to draw trumps but how to use a trump to try to stop an opponent from winning a trick unnecessarily. In today’s deal, South is in four spades after West in the auction showed a sixcard diamond suit.

West leads the diamond ace: three, four, six. West cashes the diamond king: eight, queen, nine. West continues with the diamond jack. Should declarer ruff low or high on the board?

Note that East does not play high-low with queen-low doubleton. To drop the queen under partner’s ace shows either a singleton queen or (much more likely) the queen and the jack.

Yes, that was a dirty-trick question! If declarer ruffs low in the dummy, East overruffs, and later South loses a club trick to go down one. If he ruffs high, he will concede both a spade and a club trick. Instead, declarer must discard a club from the dummy -- a loser-on-loser play. He wins the next trick (perhaps overruffing East if West perseveres with a fourth diamond), draws trumps and takes a safe club ruff in the dummy. Declarer’s 10 tricks are five spades, two hearts, two clubs and the club ruff.