Learning to analyze your partner’s opening lead
With few opportunities to play cards in person due to the ongoing coronavirus crisis, bridge players can keep their game sharp by trying out the problem posed in our weekly quiz.
Today’s quiz: Here is another in the current series of quizzes on interpreting your partner’s opening lead. In the following problem you are given the bidding, your partner’s lead, and your own and the dummy’s holding in the suit led, accompanied by five card combinations your partner might hold. Taking all available information into account, which of the five combinations do you think your partner might actually be leading from? (More than one of the choices
could be correct.)
The bidding: Opponent-1D; Partner-Pass; Opponent-1H; You-Pass; Opponent-2C; PartnerPass; Opponent-3C; All Pass. Partner leads the S5. Dummy has A93 and you have J762. Partner could hold: a)Q1085 b)KQ85 c)54 d)K105 e)5.
Answer: The 5 would be the proper lead with four of
the five choices given, the lone exception being b), with which partner would lead the king (top of a sequence).
On the basis of the bidding, however, it is virtually impossible that partner could hold either c) or e), which would mean crediting declarer with a fouror five-card spade suit, respectively. While it is obvious that the declarer, who bid diamonds and clubs at his first two turns, could hardly have a fivecard spade suit, it is equally improbable that he could have four spades either (headed by the KQ10, no less), since he would surely have bid one spade rather than two clubs the second time around.
The bidding does allow for partner to have a) or d), though, so either is a legitimate possibility. Note that as regards d), there is no prohibition against leading away from a king, a notion that some players mistakenly entertain (although in this particular case, that lead will allow declarer to score a trick with his queen if he plays low from dummy).