Bridge

Opening lead — six of hearts.

It may sometimes be necessary to make a play that runs totally contrary to standard procedure in order to achieve your goal.

For example, assume you’re in three notrump and West leads a heart. It seems perfectly normal to win East’s nine with the queen and lead the jack of diamonds, hoping to find West with the queen. In that case, you’d be sure of making at least 10 tricks. In the actual deal, however, if you led the jack and finessed, you’d soon find yourself down one after East took the queen and returned a heart, establishing West’s suit.

But the fact is that if West has the queen of diamonds, you can make the contract by playing the hand in an entirely different way — and at the same time almost certainly make the contract if East has the queen.

You have to make a peculiar-looking play to accomplish your purpose, but it is nonetheless a very sound play. All you have to do is to lead a club to dummy’s queen at trick two and return a low diamond!

It is true that in the actual deal East can defeat you by putting up the queen of diamonds instead of following low, but how many players do you know who would make that play? East would almost surely play low from the Q-x, Q-x-x of diamonds, and after he did, you would have the contract all wrapped up regardless of how West proceeded.

Of course, it’s been drilled into all of us that, with the diamond combination shown in this deal, declarer should always initiate the suit by leading toward the K-10-x-x. But standard practice should be willingly suspended when the appropriate occasion arises, and there is no doubt that this deal is one of those rare times.