Contract Bridge

Consider this deal where South is declarer at four hearts. You’d probably agree with East’s opening diamond bid, South’s one- heart overcall and West’s one- spade bid but might disagree with what happened from then on. Many players would bid only two hearts with the North hand, and some would not carry on to four hearts with the South hand.

Be that as it may, let’s say declarer ducks West’s jack- ofdiamonds lead and wins the next diamond with the ace. He then successfully finesses the queen of spades, cashes the ace, and ruffs a spade in dummy. Next comes a low heart to the eight, taken by West with the ace.

West is now forced to return a club, since a spade would yield a ruff- and- discard. When he leads the five, South plays the nine from dummy and captures East’s king with the ace.

Declarer cashes the queen of trump and then leads a club toward dummy’s J-2. West goes up with the queen, and South makes four hearts after parking his diamond loser on dummy’s jack of clubs.

A good workmanlike job by declarer, you might say, ducking the first diamond and then tackling spades at trick three instead of leading a trump first. It was this sequence of plays that eventually forced West to lead a club at trick seven and enabled South to avoid losing a second diamond trick.

But if you analyze the situation more closely, you find that there were two ways West could have defeated the contract. First, if he had cashed the ace of hearts at trick two before leading his second diamond, he could not have been forced to break the clubs later.

Failing that, however, all he had to do was to return the queen of clubs rather than the five at trick seven! There would have been nothing declarer could do to overcome this extraordinary play, and South would have to go down one.