Contract Bridge

When the bidding tells declarer that a key card is likely to be unfavorably located, he should try to find a way to turn what he knows to his advantage. Consider this deal where declarer emerged victorious from what appeared at first to be certain defeat.

South ducked the opening spade lead and won East’s continuation with the ace as West discarded a low heart. Declarer could count 26 points between his own hand and dummy, marking East with virtually every missing high card for his opening bid.

South could also count six top tricks in the combined hands — a spade, a heart, a diamond and three clubs — and since East had to have the king of hearts, he could assume that two successful heart finesses would yield two more. Declarer’s problem, therefore, was how to manufacture a ninth trick.

The only real possibility was to turn dummy’s queen of diamonds into a trick, which would normally be attempted by leading low toward the queen in the hope that West had the king. But because East was marked with the king, this approach was certain to fail.

Declarer found the winning solution, nevertheless. After taking the spade at trick two, he crossed to dummy with a club, led a heart to the queen, re- entered dummy with a club, repeated the heart finesse, then cashed the heart ace and club king.

Having reduced his holding to only spades and diamonds in both hands and, more importantly, having done exactly the same thing to East, South now led a spade, deliberately allowing East to cash three tricks in that suit.

This brought the defense’s total to four tricks, but that was all they could get. After cashing the last spade, East was forced to lead from the K- 9 of diamonds, allowing declarer to score dummy’s queen, and the contract was home.