Should declarer ruff or discard?

Raymond Joseph Teller, of Penn and Teller fame, wrote in a letter: “I really feel as if the things we create together are not things we devised, but things we discovered, as if, in some sense, they were always there in us, waiting to be revealed, like the figure of Mercury waiting in a rough lump of marble.”

This week, we will try to carve out some rough guidelines for when declarer should ruff, overruff or discard.

To start, what ought not to be a rocky deal to get right. South is in four hearts. West leads the diamond five, East wins with his ace and returns the diamond three. What should declarer do?

North was tempted to rebid three no-trump, a contract that would have made unless East led a low diamond, and West shifted to the club queen — nigh impossible.

The killing defense is not easy here, either. West leads a low club, East wins the first trick and shifts to a low diamond, and West goes back to clubs.

After West's actual diamond lead, South had nine winners: three spades and six hearts. If he had discarded at trick two, dummy's diamond queen would have become a 10th trick, but that would have risked the contract if West shifted to a club, as surely he would have, and East had that ace.

Instead, declarer correctly ruffed at trick two, drew trumps and played spades from the top. When the jack appeared on the third round, South cashed dummy's spade 10 to make his contract.

Note that if an opponent had jack-fourth of spades, declarer would have hoped that West had the club ace.