Aces on Bridge

A simple auction sees West on lead with a blind choice against four spades. While a trump would work best, he can hardly be blamed for selecting a diamond as what appears to be his most passive lead option.

Consider your play before contributing a card from dummy. You appear to have one diamond, three hearts and one possible spade loser if you treat South as the master hand. The good news is that your heart losers can be covered by dummy’s trumps.

Your plan should be to ruff two of the heart losers in dummy, so you have to take the opening lead with the diamond ace to avoid surrendering a tempo. Given a second chance, the defenders might shift to spades, after which you would be unable to ruff two hearts in the North hand.

After winning the diamond ace, you should play a small heart from hand without playing any trumps. As a matter of general technique, you can preserve the heart ace as a re-entry to your hand, to facilitate communications. You take West’s spade switch in dummy, cross to hand with the heart ace to ruff a heart low, then come to the club king to ruff a second heart with dummy’s remaining high trump. Then you can re-enter your hand with the club ace to play trumps and drive out the spade queen.

The defenders can force you to ruff a diamond, but you still have enough trumps left to claim the rest.