Contract Bridge

The bidding by the opponents often helps declarer find his best line of play. In this deal, for example, South has a far greater chance of making four hearts because of East’s opening bid than he would if East-West had remained silent. East’s one-spade opening drew a neat blueprint for declarer to follow to a successful conclusion.

West led the jack of spades, and East took the king with the ace and cashed the queen. East then returned the jack of diamonds.

Having already lost two tricks, South’s problem was to avoid two club losers. This could not be done against most divisions of the East-West cards, but South found the winning solution by relying largely on the clues furnished by the bidding.

Declarer could see 12 points in dummy and 15 points in his own hand. This left only 13 points to account for East’s opening bid, and even that number had been reduced to 12 by West’s lead of the jack of spades. East was therefore virtually certain to hold both the king and queen of clubs. All that remained was to take advantage of this knowledge.

Declarer won the jack of diamonds with the queen, drew two rounds of trump, and ruffed his last spade in dummy. He then played the king of diamonds to the ace and led a low club.

When West followed low, declarer played the nine. East won with the king but then had to return a spade, a diamond or a club, and whichever he chose was bound to give South the rest of the tricks.

Of course, if East had held the ten of clubs in addition to the K-Q, this line of play would not have worked. But in that case, no other approach would have been successful either.