DAILY BRIDGE CLUB

I am convinced that two major factors separate players who do well from those who struggle to break average: Winning players have solid fundamental skills; they keep their avoidable errors to a minimum.

Many types of errors exist: faulty hand evaluation, hasty play, convention abuse, aberrations from a loss of focus. One error I often see in learning players is missing easy inferences. When you have a problem as declarer, such as locating a missing queen, you invariably will have helpful clues from the bidding or the opening lead or from the way the defenders are operating.

In today’s deal from a matchpoint event, West leads a club against South’s four hearts, and East takes the king and tries to cash the ace. Declarer ruffs and draws trumps.

Say declarer leads a diamond toward dummy next, and West plays low. Declarer can recall the bidding: East opened, West issued a single raise. Declarer might play dummy’s jack, reasoning that if he misguesses — East has the queen but not the ace — East will have the king of spades for his opening bid, and the contract will be made despite the misguess.

But instead of wondering how the East-West honors might lie, South should try to find out for sure. South should draw trumps with the A-K and lead the queen of spades for a finesse: a “discovery” play. When the finesse wins, South can make a useful overtrick by guessing right in diamonds. Once East has shown up with the king of spades, West is likely to have the ace of diamonds for his raise to two clubs. So South leads a diamond to dummy’s king.

East dealer

Both sides vulnerable