ACES ON BRIDGE

“They say everything in the world is good for something.”

— John Dryden

Most pairs routinely open one no-trump with five-card majors these days.

North-South should not have any trouble finding spades here, though. Stayman informs North of his partner’s spade length, and he now jumps to four hearts. This cannot be natural, of course, as North would have transferred to hearts directly with five of them. Instead, it agrees spades as the trump suit, and as a passed hand, North is protected from his partner getting too carried away. However, South now knows his partner should have a source of tricks in a minor and drives to a slam via key-card.

When West leads the diamond four, South sees he has no losers in the black suits, but he must plan to take care of two losing hearts and two losing diamonds. The best line is to set up dummy’s club suit to establish discards for his own losers. South wins the first diamond and draws two rounds of trumps, then goes after the clubs. He takes the club king, leads to dummy’s ace, then ruffs a club. Since the suit breaks favorably, the ruff establishes the rest of dummy’s long suit. Declarer returns to dummy with a trump and throws three of his losers from hand on the winning clubs. The defenders can have one red-suit trick, but the other loser will be ruffed in dummy.

Had trumps split 3-1, declarer would have needed to stop drawing them after two rounds to play on clubs right away, lest he run out of entries to dummy. He needs a ruff in dummy and therefore cannot afford to use up all of dummy’s spades.

ANSWER: You should try to establish the spades. Since you will have to play the suit from your side, the spade ace is the best card. You will now be able to pin a doubleton spade jack in dummy, or else continue with a low one. But equally importantly, you have retained the tempo to shift to hearts if spades look unprofitable.