Opening Lead: ♠8
The crucial play is made on the first trick. Can you spot it?
Opening Lead: ♣Q. Plan the Hand.
There are four possible losers: 1♥ and 3♦. There are nine winners: ♠AKQJ10, ♥AK, ♣AK. We need to find one more winner and avoid losing 3♦. One way to achieve this is to win the ♣ in dummy and immediately lead a low ♦. If East plays low we can finesse the ♦10 hoping to find the ♦honors split with West holding the Ace and East holding the King. Another possibility is to find ♥ 3-3 and promote one of dummy's low ♥. Neither line works on this layout. But...a losing ♦ can be trumped in dummy providing that you delay drawing trump. If you draw even a single round of trump before playing on ♦ the enemy can lead ♠ each time they get in with a ♦ and leave dummy bereft of trumps when it comes time to trump the losing ♦.
Opening Lead: ♠10
It looks easy, right? Simply win the second round of spades with Dummy’s ♠ King, then finesse East for the King of diamonds and bring home twelve tricks. But…Blackwood always likes to illustrate his points with subtlety that makes you think. In this example, you must take repeated finesses against East and the cards you lead from Dummy at each turn makes the difference between success and failure. Study the hand and then click the “next” button to see if you would have played it correctly.
West leads the ♠5. Plan the play.
There are 6 top winners: ♠AKQ, ♥A, ♣AK. We need 3 more. If ♣s divide 3-2 we set up two tricks but will still need 1 more. Solution... Attach ♦s! while we still have double stoppers in the other suits. Now it doesn't matter what suit West leads since we have the others double stopped and the ♣AK for entries to North's ♦s after we knock out the ♦A.
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