BRIDGE

Chalk one up for

declarer

Assume you’re declarer at six notrump and West leads the ten of spades. How would you play the hand?

You can count 11 sure tricks at the outset — four spades, four clubs, two hearts and the king or queen of diamonds. To make the slam, you need to score a trick with the jack of hearts, and the best way to do this would seem to be to finesse East for the queen. In the actual case, though, the finesse would fail, and you’d go down.

When the deal occurred, South found the notion of entrusting the outcome to a simple finesse to be distasteful, so he sought a way to improve on his chances and wound up making the slam.

After taking the first spade with the queen, he immediately led a diamond toward the king. West could not afford to take his ace without establishing declarer’s 12th trick, so he let the king win. South then cashed all his spades and clubs, coming down to the K-J-4 of hearts and queen of diamonds in his hand opposite dummy’s A-6-5 of hearts and seven of diamonds.

Meanwhile, West had elected to hang onto the Q-10-3 of hearts and ace of diamonds, discarding the diamond jack on the last club. Reading the situation perfectly, declarer now led the diamond queen, forcing West to win with the ace and return a heart, which handed South the slam.

It’s true that West could (and should) have given declarer a far more difficult problem by discarding a heart rather than a diamond on the last club. South would then have had to cash the A-K of hearts, dropping West’s queen, to make the slam, certainly no easy task without peeking.

But what West could or should have done is not really the point. By playing as he did, declarer gave himself an extra chance, and in the end it yielded a dividend worth about 1,000 points.