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Today’s West finds himself declaring 4♥ and getting the helpful lead of the ♠5. Counting losers, West had 1 possible spade loser, 1 sure heart loser (♥A) and 1 possible heart loser (♥J), 1 sure and 1 possible diamond loser, and no club losers. That’s 3 possible losers and 2 sure losers. To make ten tricks, Declarer has to get rid of 2 of the 3 possible losers.
Note that there are as many as TWO diamond losers. With only 8 hearts between the two hands, Declarer will have to draw at least three rounds of trumps. If Declarer draws trumps immediately (or even starts drawing them), he will lose two of the 3 diamonds in his hand.
In order to eliminate the “possible” second diamond loser, Declarer needs to ruff one in Dummy. So far, so obvious. Now the key point: he must go to work on diamonds immediately, before drawing trump. [If you want an example of playing the spade suit for a second round before working on diamonds, click here. Once Declarer has stripped dummy of Diamonds and he has ruffed his third diamond in dummy, then and only then can he work on drawing trump. Time after time I observe players who do not foresee the need to make this play.
Moreover, if you move around to the defenders’ side, you can see that an important defense is to prevent Declarer from being able to ruff in the Dummy (or the hand with the fewer trump). It, of course, involves leading trumps, so the execution can be more complicated that it might seem. Today’s deal is not a good example of that defense as North has 4 trump and 2 natural trump tricks, so leading trumps would be giving up a trick to gain a trick, which is not a great bargain. But on many deals, it is important for the defense to lead trump to prevent Declarer from creating this type of trick for himself. Watch for it at the table, especially when your opponents do it against you. The pain of having them prevent you from creating an important trick can burn it into your mind and help you to use the same defense on other, appropriate deals.
Two final notes about counting tricks. On this deal, when counting losers in the heart suit, it is important to realize that the ♥J is a potential loser. Whenever you have a KQ10 holding in a suit, however they are distributed between Declarer’s hand and Dummy’s hand (but as long as the 10 is with one of the other honors), one of your jobs as declarer is to try to find the jack. If you fail, it becomes a loser. That possibility needs to be included in your initial count of losers.
Secondly, after the spade lead, the play of Dummy’s ♠10 and South’s ♠K, it is important to see that Declarer stills has a potential spade loser on the 4th round of spades. If Declarer had realized this when he cashed the ♠Q and North followed with the 2 (a doubleton for sure), he might have recognized the need to finesse the ♣Q to get rid of the spade loser, the first way many of us learned to create a trick. At first glance the finesse seems unnecessary, as Declarer only has a singleton club, but in the quest to create tricks sometimes we have to take risks.
With that I will leave you to your mission as Declarer: creating tricks.
Best of luck.
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