Contract Bridge

The goal of an elimination play is to create a situation where, when declarer puts one of the opponents on lead, any return will cost the defense a trick. Here is a typical case.

Let’s say you get to six diamonds on the bidding shown and West leads the king of clubs. At first blush, making the slam seems to depend on a spade finesse, which is far from a rosy prospect considering West’s one- spade overcall. But when you study the hand more closely, you realize that there is actually an excellent chance of bringing the contract home by means of an elimination play.

Accordingly, you win the club with the ace, draw three rounds of trumps and cash the A- K- Q of hearts. Cashing the hearts is in keeping with the standard procedure of removing all the cards with which the opponents can later exit safely. ( If you surrendered the lead before removing the hearts, the opponents could exit with one at no cost to themselves.)

Then, in line with the same strategy, you make the key play of cashing the king of spades. You do this in order to extract East’s probable singleton in that suit. Having completed these preliminaries, you then lead a club from dummy, unconcerned over which opponent wins the trick.

In the actual case, if East wins the club, he must return a heart or a club, allowing you to discard the jack of spades as you ruff in dummy.

The outcome is the same if West wins the club. In that case, he must either yield a ruff- and- discard or lead a spade into your A- J. Whichever he chooses, the slam is home.