From                   11th July, 2007, Board 7

                                          Difficulty            * * 

                                          Dlr South            Both Vul

East leads the Club Six.  Where do you win this trick?  And what then?

SOLUTION

This one looks almost too easy, which is the time to be extra careful.  First of all, do we win the first trick in Dummy or in our hand?  If we win it in Dummy, and they duck two rounds of Spades, and if the A♥ is offside, we will be shut out of our 4^th Spade trick.  So, let’s win that first trick in our hand.

Having won that Club in our hand, what suit do we attack next?  Spades or Diamonds?  The answer to that question is Spades.  Look what happens if we cash our Diamonds first.  Dummy gets squeezed!  On the two last Diamonds we cannot pitch our Club winner, nor do we want to pitch away our Spade winners.  So we would have to pitch two Hearts, which is not a good idea, that might fatally weaken our Heart holding if East has the A♠ and West has the A♥.

So, we play on Spades first, winding up with 10 tricks when the A♠ is with West, and the Diamonds break 3-2.

This is a hand where the solution is quite simple, but where it would be so easy to get careless at Trick One.

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