Contract Bridge
Test your play
1. You are declarer with the West hand at Three Notrump, and North leads the four of spades.
South wins with the king and returns the seven, which you cover with the ten. North takes the queen and shifts to the jack of hearts. How would you play so as to ensure the contract against any distribution of the North-South cards?
West East
♠ J 10 9 5 3 ♠ 62
♥ A 10 8 ♥ K95
♦ 7 ♦ A K J 10 3 ♣ 8654 ♣ AKQ
2. You are declarer with the West hand at the highly ambitious contract of Seven Hearts, and North leads the queen of spades.
Assuming the trumps are divided 2-2, how would you play the hand?
West East
♠ A 10 ♠ 9763
♥ A Q 10 7 4 ♥ KJ98
♦ A K J 10 9 ♦ 72
♣ A ♣ Q 10 5 1. The only way you can be 100% sure of the contract is to play dummy’s king and your ace on North’s jack of hearts! Now lead the jack of spades to force out the ace, establishing two spade tricks in your hand.
Let’s assume North wins and makes the neutral return of a club to dummy’s queen. You next lead a low heart to your eight.
Regardless of how the opponents defend, they cannot stop you from reaching your hand with either the eight or ten of hearts, so you are certain to score two spades, two hearts, two diamonds and three clubs to come to nine tricks.
If you adopt any other line of play, you might make the contract, but you cannot be sure of it. The extraordinary play of the ace and king of hearts at trick three removes all doubt about the outcome.
2. Take the ace of spades, cash the A-K of hearts, lead a diamond from dummy and finesse the nine. If the nine wins, enter dummy with a trump and repeat the finesse. If the diamonds are divided 3-3 or 4-2, you make the contract by discarding three spades from dummy and then ruffing the ten of spades.
It would be wrong to cash the A-K of diamonds, planning to ruff a diamond in dummy. Unless the queen fell under the A-K — less than a 20% chance — it would then be impossible to avoid a spade loser. As opposed to this, a first-round diamond finesse against the queen offers nearly a 50% chance of success.
Note that it would also be wrong to cash the ace of diamonds first and then try the finesse, since you could no longer make the slam if South started with four diamonds to the queen.