Contract Bridge

When you are missing four

cards of a suit, they will divide

3-1 50 percent of the time, 2-2

40 percent of the time and 4-0

10 percent of the time. These are mathematical figures only, and you needn’t memorize them if you don’t want to. But there are times when even a partial familiarity with probable distributions will alert you to an incipient danger and induce you to adopt precautionary steps that might not otherwise come to mind.

Consider this deal where West leads a spade against six hearts. A favorable outcome seems preordained until declarer wins with the king, leads a low trump to the jack, and East unexpectedly shows out.

If South begins to worry about making the slam at this point, it is already too late. Regardless of what he does, he will eventually lose two trump tricks and go down one.

Granting that a 4-0 division is relatively rare, it is certainly not unprecedented. In fact, South’s only concern from the opening gong should be a 4-0 trump division, the only real threat to the contract. All his thoughts should therefore be focused on dealing with that one possibility, unlikely though it might be.

Declarer should arrive at the conclusion that if East has all four trumps, the slam is sure to fail, but that if West has them, he can be limited to one trump trick by playing the king of hearts at trick two.

Once the king is led, West cannot score two trump tricks regardless of how he elects to defend, and the slam is home. Tomorrow: Bidding quiz.