Contract Bridge

Counting out a hand might be thought of by some as a difficult exercise, but the fact is that the process is fairly easy, and anyone who can count to 13 should be able to meet the challenge.

Assume you’re in six notrump and West leads the king of diamonds. When dummy appears, you can count 11 sure tricks, and your problem is to find a 12th. The only suit that offers any real hope of producing an extra trick is spades, where you have a reasonably good chance to make four tricks instead of three.

Scoring a fourth spade trick might appear to be simply a matter of finding the suit divided 3- 3 or dropping the singleton or doubleton jack, but there’s much more to it than that. To begin with, you should duck the king of diamonds as the first step in a campaign to learn all you possibly can about the distribution of the adverse cards.

Let’s say West continues with the queen of diamonds, on which East discards a heart.

The wisdom of holding off on the previous trick immediately becomes apparent because you quickly learn that West started with five diamonds and East with only one.

After taking the second diamond with the ace, you test the East-West distribution still further by cashing three hearts and four clubs, in the course of which you learn that West started with three hearts and three clubs, as well as five diamonds.

With 11 of West’s 13 cards now accounted for in those three suits, he cannot have started with more than two spades. Accordingly, you cash the ace of spades, cross to the king and then lead dummy’s last spade. When East produces the nine, you finesse the ten with absolute certainty that it will win the trick.