Which Card to Lead? by Matthias Huberschwiller

A: ♠3 – With five cards in Spades, you will of course lead the suit. As you have only two touching honours, you must not lead the head of sequence but the fourth best.

Your result so far:

A: ♥J – Here, you have a broken sequence, King-Jack-ten, with only the Queen missing. In that case, you need to lead the top of the inner sequence, that is to say the Jack.

Your result so far:

A: ♣6 – With four small cards in a suit, you must not lead fourth best (which promises an honour), but the second best.

This is not to confound with leading Top of Nothing, where you lead the highest of three small.


Your result so far:

A: ♠4 – Given your length in Diamonds, declarer’s first suit, you know that he’ll try to get several ruffs.

In order to prevent him, you thus have to lead a trump. With two small cards, you lead the smaller one.

Why? Imagine that declarer plays two rounds of Hearts and ruffs the third with the ♠8. It would be a pity not to be able to overruff.


Your result so far:

A: ♣6 – What will be declarer’s plan for his contract? He will draw trumps and then discard his losers on dummy’s Diamonds.

So, you need to take your tricks before he can execute this plan. For that, you need to lead from your long suit, clubs. You need to choose the fourth best, the six.


Your result so far: