This column has recently reported back on the exploits of Goldilocks and the Three Bears at the Ursine Bridge Club. Today’s deal saw Goldilocks toiling over the repair of a broken chair at home, when the Bears returned from their foray into duplicate. It didn’t take long before Papa Bear prepared to regale her with his performance on this challenging deal.

On the auction shown, Papa had reached six no-trump, a contract that appears to depend on the play in the heart suit. When asked what line he had followed, Papa revealed that he had cashed the king and led up to dummy. When only small cards appeared, he worked out that the only doubleton that would help him was the doubleton nine in East, so he put up the 10 and lived happily ever after.

“You were lucky,” remarked Mama Bear bitterly. “I also played six no-trump and won the spade lead to play a heart toward my king. When East put up the nine, I now had the losing option of playing East for a doubleton jack-nine or queen-nine. I misguessed and went down a trick.”

Baby Bear had seemed close to exploding but was finally allowed to get a word in edgewise. “I didn’t have to guess hearts,” he remarked. When asked to explain, he said that his partner as South had bid four spades over four diamonds, agreeing diamonds, and that led to a contract of seven diamonds. Even after a trump lead, it was easy to ruff out the hearts and take 13 tricks without any problems.

Today’s deal comes from a bridge magazine and was created more than 60 years ago. Put yourself in South’s seat and see if you can find a way to conjure up a 12th trick from the remarkably few straws that can be put together to make a brick.

You declare six no-trump on the lead of the club jack and can see at once that you have 12 easy tricks if diamonds break. Your best subsidiary chance comes at trick one: If East wastes his ace, you will have a finesse position in clubs to allow you to come home. But no, East thoughtfully plays low, and you win your club king. You then cash the diamond ace to get the bad news. Are you going to take your ball and go home?

The winning line requires a misdefense, but when you see it, you might ask yourself if you would have fallen for it. You cross to a spade in dummy and advance the heart jack. When East covers — wouldn’t you? — you win, unblock your last heart winner and run the spades.

You reduce to a four-card ending where West needs to keep his heart 10 and three diamonds, or concede at once. You exit with a heart, and West must win, only to be endplayed into giving you the three diamond tricks you need for your slam.

Because covering the heart jack with the king is probably right if declarer began with three hearts, it is hard to criticize East too much for failing to find the winning defense of ducking the heart jack.

This year marks the centenary of the birth of a bridge player who was better known as a prose writer, translator and mathematician. His name was Geza Ottlik, and he classified many hitherto unrecognized positions in bridge. “Adventures in Card Play” is one of bridge’s more fascinating and complex books.

Here is a deal he created for the Budapest 1977 Junior Camp. He called it “Find the Lad,” in contrast to “Find the Lady.”

Against four hearts, West leads the spade five, and East plays the queen. With inevitable spade and club losers, you would like to hold your trump losers to one. It helps to be a good guesser, but are there are any clues or other pieces of information you need to process?

If you go after trumps on your own, you will surely lose two tricks in the suit today. Instead, you should try to avoid guessing trumps altogether. If the club king is onside, you may not need to open up the trump suit at all.

Return a spade at trick two, win the diamond shift at trick three, then play the second top diamond and ruff a diamond with the heart seven. Next you ruff a spade, as East pitches a diamond, then you advance the club jack and run it if West does not cover. But let’s say he does cover: If so, you ruff yet another spade, cash your remaining club honor and cut loose with your last club. In the three-card ending with just trumps in both hands, the opponents must find the trump jack for you.

Today’s deal might appear straightforward at teams, but at matchpoints you can imagine there would be a temptation to put your contract at risk. Let’s look at teams play. You declare four hearts on the defense of repeated club leads. You ruff the second, and I assume you cash the heart ace, with both opponents following. What would you do now? No peeking at the opponents’ cards!

If trumps are 3-2, almost any approach will lead to 10 tricks. But today, if you cross to a top diamond and take the trump finesse, West will win his doubleton queen and lead a second diamond to give his partner a ruff.

So is the solution simply to cash both top trumps? Not at all, since your secondary concern should be managing a 4-1 trump break. If you take the two top trumps and find an opponent showing out, you cannot prevent the other opponent from scoring both his small trumps, and eventually a spade as well.

So after both opponents follow to the first trump, the best line is to play a low trump from hand at trick four!

The point is that when West wins, then even if trumps are 4-1, the best he can do is play a third round of clubs. But you can simply discard a spade from hand. You can then ruff a fourth round of clubs in dummy and cross to hand with a spade to draw the remaining trumps.

While the chance of each unfriendly lie of the cards is small, why not protect against both?

English expert Andrew Robson is not only a fine player, but he also runs a superb bridge club in London and has made a specialty of writing simple and informative bridge books. Over the next few months, I’ll be running a few deals from his latest themed collection, “Counting and Card Placement.” See www.baronbarclay.com/category/books.

In today’s example, you reach four spades after opening one spade in fourth seat. West leads the diamond king and continues with the queen, followed by the jack to East’s ace, which you ruff. What now?

The odds narrowly favor playing for the drop in trumps. But “eight ever, nine never” is a big overstatement. If you knew who held the heart ace, it might influence your decision.

It is time for a discovery play, so at trick four, you lead a heart to dummy’s king. Your rationale is that playing on hearts may tell you how to play spades. If dummy’s king wins the trick, you can be sure West holds the ace — but you can play a second heart, just in case East is very smart, or very stupid.

Once West has revealed an ace in addition to his diamond sequence, East is heavily favored to hold the spade queen, or West would have 12 points and would likely have opened the bidding. So play spades by cashing the king and leading to your jack.

Note that if East turns up with the heart ace, you are still on a spade guess. But the discovery play cost nothing.

We showed a deal from a Vanderbilt match between Hawkins and Pavlicek yesterday. The Pavlicek team had their revenge a deal or two later when the defenders ducked one too many times, and Bob Jones read the cards accurately to land a difficult contract.

West led the club 10 to the queen, jack and two. Jones played the diamond jack, which West decided to duck. Next came a low spade from dummy, and it was East’s turn to duck. Declarer won the jack and cashed the diamond ace. Next came Jones’ singleton heart, and West played low — this was the duck that was fatal to the defense, though it was very hard to see why at the time.

The heart king held the trick, and Jones, reading the layout with great accuracy, cashed the spade ace, extracting West’s last exit card. Then he played a low heart from dummy to West’s ace.

West could cash the club ace and play the club 10 to Jones’ king, but he put her back in with a fourth round of clubs, forcing a lead away from the diamond queen at trick 12 into his king-10 of diamonds.

To defeat the contract, it was necessary for West to rise with the heart ace on the first round of the suit. From that point on, West could exit with the low heart or with a spade. (It would even have been possible to cash the club ace before playing her spade). At that point, Jones would have been unable to achieve the multiple endplays he needed.

In the 2004 Philadelphia Vanderbilt, the team captained by Richard Pavlicek took over the No. 1 seed in the event by defeating the Jim Foster team, which in turn had eliminated the defending Vanderbilt champions captained by Reese Milner in the previous round. Here, however, is one of the boards where the Foster team gained a game swing.

Against three no-trump, Mike Kamil led a heart in response to his partner’s bid. When Marty Fleisher as East correctly put in the jack, Allen Hawkins, declarer, took the trick with his queen. He led the club queen, which was ducked, but when he tried a second club to the jack, it lost to the ace.

Fleisher now thoughtfully tried to cut declarer’s communications by shifting to the spade jack, won in dummy with the queen. At this point, declarer seemed to be in rather poor shape. He could have cashed the second spade in dummy, but instead he decided to strand the spade ace by calling for a small diamond from dummy. When Fleisher rose with the king, Hawkins ducked. Fleisher switched back to hearts, leading the 10, and Hawkins took his king.

When declarer now cashed his three good clubs, he caught East in a strip-squeeze.

In the four-card ending, if Fleisher discarded down to two hearts, he could be endplayed with a heart to lead away from his diamonds. If he discarded a diamond, as he did, declarer could cash both the ace and jack. Either way, Hawkins would make his game.

The defense have a number of tactics and strategies available to them in trumps — for example, the ruff and the uppercut. It is rare for one and the same defender to get an extra trick from both strategies, but today’s deal from the second qualifying session of the national Open Pairs at the Philadelphia Nationals showed the defenders scoring well by doing just that.

In third seat, South opened one spade — after all, most macho men believe in four-card majors in third seat! West overcalled two hearts without much enthusiasm, but pairs events require you to do this sort of thing, and North had an easy bid of two spades. How bad can it be to finish up at the two-level here? Plenty bad, as you’ll see.

West led a diamond to the 10 and queen, and East cashed his diamond ace and gave his partner a ruff. Now the heart ace and a heart to the king saw declarer run the club jack to West’s king. West cashed the heart queen, then led another heart. Dummy ruffed with the six, and East over-ruffed with the eight, forcing declarer to over-ruff with his jack.

South next cashed the club ace and ruffed the club queen in dummy. He then led dummy’s last trump to the queen and West’s ace. Now West led his last heart at trick 12, and East ruffed in with the 10. When declarer over-ruffed, West’s spade nine took the contract down three tricks for plus 300 and 90 percent of the available matchpoints.

Here is a might-have-been from the Philadelphia Nationals. The deal was reported anonymously to the Daily Bulletin, and it features an intriguing possibility.

As South, cover up the East and West cards. Your mundane part-score suddenly becomes interesting at trick two. West leads the spade two to the ace, and back comes the spade seven, ruffed with the heart three. West obediently follows his partner’s suit-preference signal in spades to cash the diamond king and play a second diamond to East’s ace. When the spade six comes through you, you ruff with the eight, and West throws a club. Over to you.

You need to hold your heart losers to one in order to make your contract. If West had both honors, he would certainly have over-ruffed, so you should play East for one or both honors.

One possibility is to cross to dummy via a club to the ace and run the heart queen.

Better, perhaps (assuming that East must surely have the heart jack), is to play a heart to the queen. If it loses to the king, you can cross to the club ace and finesse the heart 10.

This line looks safe against almost any normal lie of the cards, but, as you can see, it would not work today. If West refuses to over-ruff on the third round of spades with the jack, wouldn’t you say he deserves to beat the contract? Alas, West was only good enough to find the play in the bar after the event, not to make it at the table.