Contract Bridge

The power of positive thinking

Bridge is not for lazy thinkers — not if you want to get the best results possible. You can’t just sit at the table, make only mechanical bids and plays, and expect to do well. You have to do all you can to try to figure out what everybody has, and follow those thoughts to a logical conclusion.

Consider this deal where you reach four spades on the bidding shown and West leads the king of diamonds. East takes the king with the ace and returns the five, taken by West with the ten. West continues with the queen, East discarding a club as you ruff.

Let’s say you enter dummy with a club, lead a spade to the queen and lose the finesse to the king. East later scores another trump trick, and down you go.

The sad truth is that this would be the outcome in many bridge games, and nobody would pay any attention to it. The players would think South was unlucky to lose the trump finesse. However, this would not be an accurate assessment of South’s performance.

It is not really difficult to figure out that East cannot have the king of spades and that the spade finesse is therefore a losing proposition. Once East shows up with the ace of diamonds at trick one, it must be assumed that he cannot also have the king of spades, since he surely would not have passed West’s opening bid with an ace and a king in his hand.

Declarer should therefore play the ace and a low spade, instead of finessing, in the hope that West started with the doubleton king. It is the only realistic chance he has to make the contract, and some chance is better than no chance at all.