Contract Bridge

Assume you have a 50 percent chance of making a contract by taking a particular finesse. If that’s your only way to get home, all you can do is pray that the finesse succeeds when you try it. But in many cases of this sort you can raise your chances to significantly better than 50 percent, which would naturally improve your prospects considerably.

Take this deal where West leads a club against your sixspade contract. Superficially it seems that making the slam depends on the success or failure of the heart finesse — a 50 percent chance — but actually your prospects are much better than that if you play correctly. What you should do, after ruffing the first club and drawing trump, is lead a low diamond toward dummy’s J-2!

In the actual deal, this play puts a quick end to the proceedings. West can do no better than take his queen, establishing dummy’s jack, and sooner or later you discard dummy’s Q-5 of hearts on your A-K of diamonds, enabling you to make 12 tricks without bothering with the heart finesse.

Of course, it may turn out that East has the queen of diamonds, in which case your effort to avoid the heart finesse will be thwarted. Even so, you will be no worse off than you were before. You’ll still make the slam if West has the king of hearts, and it will have cost you absolutely nothing to test the diamond situation first.

The low diamond lead toward dummy’s jack thus gives you two shots at the contract instead of one, and raises your chances from even money to about 3-to-1 in your favor.