BRIDGE

An exercise in “Plan The Play” to go with your morning coffee.Hold the South cards and play four hearts after the opening lead of the spade five.

Since South can't use dummy's trump to ruff anything and ruffs in his own hand would add nothing to his trick count, many would launch an immediate campaign to “get the kiddies off the street”, likely by winning the spade Queen to lead the first round of trumps towards the closed hand.

And go down as a result! Doing a bit of counting,

South should see that he has four potential losers with room in his budget for only three: the red aces for sure and maybe a second heart and maybe the fourth round of spades.

To make the odds-on-action to reduce that possible four by one: win the spade lead in hand to try a low diamond towards dummy's King: if the ace sits with West, he can take the ace if he likes but the King will remain with the spade Queen providing access for a discard of the last small spade from the closed hand.

When the trump suit proved intractable in limiting losers, tricks to the red aces and the trump Jack still left ten winners for South.

A seemingly easy way to score up a game bonus except that in the online duplicate pairs game that the deal comes from, fully seven pairs out of the nine who played in four hearts went down, most often by winning the spade opening lead in dummy and going right after trumps.

Draw trumps too soon? Not soon enough? How did you do with this one?