Famous Hand
Opening lead – queen of clubs.
This deal occurred in a match between the United States and Portugal in the 2000 Open Team Olympiad. When a Portuguese pair held the North-South cards, they reached four hearts as shown. West, David Berkowitz, led the club queen to South's ace, and declarer immediately led a diamond to dummy's jack.
Against normal defense, South might have found the winning route to 10 tricks. If East takes the diamond with the queen and returns the trump ten, declarer can win with dummy's ace and lead another diamond. East wins and returns another trump, but South takes the king, ruffs a club with dummy's last trump and cashes dummy's high diamond. He then plays the spade ace, ruffs a spade, draws trumps and scores his 10th trick with the diamond nine.
But that's not exactly how it went, because when declarer played a diamond to the jack at trick two, East, Larry Cohen, won with the ace! He then returned a trump to dummy's ace.
Convinced that West had the diamond queen, declarer now embarked on a line of play that, with normal breaks, was virtually certain to yield 10 tricks. He played the ace of spades and ruffed a spade, ruffed a club, on which Cohen unblocked the king, and ruffed another spade. He then cashed the K-Q of trumps, disclosing the 4-1 trump split and leaving Cohen with the master trump.
South had eight tricks and thought he had a good chance to score two more with the K-10 of diamonds. But when he next led a diamond to the ten, the roof caved in. Cohen took his queen and returned a club to West's ten. When Berkowitz cashed another club, Cohen got rid of his remaining diamond, and his ten of trumps took the last trick for down two!
Observe that after Cohen took the first diamond with the ace, declarer could have scored five heart tricks in his hand, two club ruffs in dummy, the two black aces and the diamond king to make his contract.