How's Your Declarer Play?

In this lesson:
Once dummy is tabled, and before you play a card, after counting your winners (or losers), you must STOP, THINK, and make a plan. There are many areas you must address. Here are several of the most important ones:

A. How do you plan to reduce your number of losers (or increase your number of winners)?

B. Identify the key suit to work on.

• In a notrump contract, it is NOT always your longest combined suit. Frequently, it is a suit where you are missing the ace.
• In a suit contract, if declarer's hand includes 4+ cards in a side suit, that is often the suit you must address.

C. What technique should you use in this key suit?

There are many possibilities, such as taking a finesse or losing a loser early.

D. Trumps

• How many trump do the opponents have?
• Should you draw trump ASAP? (More often than not, the correct answer is NO.)

In this lesson, Marty will show you how to:

• - Give yourself an extra chance to make the hand.
• - Be more knowledgeable in deciding whether to draw trump.
• - Overcome bad splits.
• - Succeed no matter which opponent has a missing honor.
• - Draw helpful inferences about the opening leader's hand from the card he led.
• - Take advantage of subtle clues from a revealing auction.
• - Know when and how to execute an endplay (even in NT).
• - Become more proficient in not being dependent on a finesse.
• - Use a discovery play to avoid a guess.'
• - Make a deceptive play that rates to succeed.

Here is an example of what Marty will teach:

Contract: 3NT

Lead: ♠Q

West leads the ♠Q against your 3NT contract.

How will you play?

Answer To How will You Play?

You play a spade from dummy. East follows with the ♠2.

You have 8 obvious winners: 2 spades, 1 heart, 1 diamond, 4 clubs. You would NOT like a heart shift, so you must win the first spade. Your only chance for a 9th trick is to win a trick with the ♦Q. But your only realistic hope of doing so is to lead toward it and hope East has the ♦K so that you can eventually win two diamond tricks. But as is usually true after an auction of 2NT - 3NT, entries to dummy are scarce.

What you want to do is enter dummy to lead a diamond towards your queen. If East rises with the ♦K, your ♦Q is a winner. But since the ♦Q is now singleton, when you do cash it, you still need a way to get back to dummy in another suit to win the ♦A.

But dummy's only entry outside of diamonds is the ♣K. Or is it? Might dummy's meager hand include an additional entry?

Did you take a close look at dummy's clubs? The fact that dummy's ♣5 is higher than your ♣4 gives you hope. Perhaps the ♣5 can be used as a 2nd entry.

Now you are ready to play the hand. Win the opening spade lead and cash the ♣A and the ♣Q. Both opponents follow. Great! That's a start. You can now afford to overtake your ♣J with dummy's ♣K. That removes the opponents' last club, so dummy's ♣5 is now an entry.

You now lead dummy's ♦2. East goes up with the ♦K. Excellent!! For the first time you are looking good. Regardless of what East leads, your contract is assured.

Once you regain the lead, you will unblock the ♦Q. You will then lead your carefully preserved ♣4 to dummy's ♣5 and cash the ♦A. Making 3NT.

Here is the full deal: