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Your Hand
♠ A 10 7 3
♥ Q 10 4
♦ 9 5 4
♣ 10 5 2 |
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Q: 3 - What’s your defensive plan?
*2
♦=fit jump, inviting game with five Diamonds and four Clubs
South | West | North | East |
- | Pass | Pass | 1♣ |
Pass | 2♦* | Pass | 3NT |
Pass | Pass | Pass | |
A: ♥10. Your poor minor suit holdings strongly indicate that declarer will be able to run both of those suits. At best partner will only have one stop in one of them. Therefore you must get busy and lead a major. As discussed in the previous quizzes, you shouldn’t often lead from Axxx against 3NT. You can easily give away a trick to declarer’s stray honor, and most of the time if you need to attack the suit you will can still do so later on. For example, if you’re cashing four tricks in the suit then you need another outside trick, which will often be an entry that declarer has to knock out. Then you can turn to the Axxx suit at that point.
Here there’s more of a case to lead from Axxx, since it’s possible that you could be beating the contract off the bat if partner has five of them. That wouldn’t give declarer much of a 3NT bid though, since he could have investigated other strains at a comfortably low level. Declarer most likely has good stoppers in both majors, probably with the ♠K.
Therefore you need to lead a Heart, hoping that partner can win the ♥A and switch to a Spade, through declarer. Thus you hope to take a Heart and four Spades. To this end you should spurn the normal lead of the ♥4 for the Ten, to discourage partner from continuing the suit. If he can see the Nine, either in his own hand or dummy, he will think you’re leading from 10 x and will get the message to switch to Spades.
It’s not often that you can plan (and mastermind) the defense on the opening lead, but here you can see that declarer won’t have much trouble bringing the minor suits in, so you need to hope to take five quick tricks.
Your result so far: