Contract Bridge

To be a good bridge player, one must be willing to make assumptions about the layout of the unseen cards, even if the desired layout seems unlikely at best. To do otherwise would be self-defeating.

Here is a typical case. Let’s say you’re West and lead the queen of spades against South’s threenotrump contract. Declarer wins with the ace as partner contributes the discouraging deuce. Declarer now leads a club, which you duck, but you are forced to win the next club with the ace.

You are now at the critical point of the play. You can see that if you continue with a spade, declarer will almost surely make the contract, scoring five club tricks, two spades and an unknown number of diamonds (the suit he bid initially).

To beat the contract, your side must therefore take four heart tricks before declarer regains the lead, and this involves making an assumption about South’s heart holding. Besides crediting South with no more than two hearts (a virtual certainty given the bidding and play thus far), you must assume that he does not have the ace or jack, because if he has either of those cards, you can’t defeat the contract.

Once your thinking brings you this far, the rest is easy. With the Q-10-6-3 of hearts in the dummy, you can work out that you can’t score four heart tricks if you lead either the king or the four first, assuming declarer plays correctly.

So, by the process of elimination, you are compelled to shift to the nine of hearts at trick four. If you do that, declarer cannot prevent you from scoring four successive heart tricks regardless of what he does, and so finishes down one.