Contract Bridge

Let’s say you’re in seven notrump and West leads a heart. When dummy appears, you can count nine tricks in spades, hearts and clubs, so you will need four diamond tricks to land the grand slam.

There are several ways to tackle the diamonds successfully — all depending on how they’re divided — but your job is to find the winning way, assuming you see only 26 cards.

To meet this challenge — and before playing any diamonds at all — you should try to learn everything you possibly can about how the opposing cards are divided. You start by cashing the A- K- Q of hearts. As it happens, East shows out on the third round, so you now know that West started with five hearts and East with two.

Next you cash the A- K- Q of clubs, choosing that suit because you have more clubs than spades. This move also proves enlightening, because you learn that West started with five clubs and East with two.

Hot on the scent, you next play three rounds of spades. This, too, turns out to be highly beneficial when you learn that West began with precisely two spades — which in turn means that he must have started with exactly one diamond.

The reward for your super detective work is that the grand slam is now ice cold. So you cash dummy’s ace of diamonds and then lead a diamond to the jack with 100% assurance that the finesse will succeed.

Of course, if you look upon all the requisite preliminary moves as overly complex and laborious and choose instead to address the diamonds at the very outset, you might well lose the relatively rare opportunity to bring home a grand slam worth more than 2,000 points.