The real issue in today’s slam is to avoid the loss of a trick in each minor. If the club finesse succeeds, you can discard one low club on the spade king, and another on the third round of diamonds. How might you succeed with the club finesse wrong?

Well, if you can sneak a diamond past whichever defender has the ace, you can discard your other diamond from hand on dummy’s spade king, and hold your losers to just one club. Equally, though, if you lead a low diamond and the player with the ace hops up with it, you will still succeed. You will now have two discards coming on the diamonds. Coupled with the discard on the spade king you will find you can get rid of all three club losers.

So which defender should be the intended victim of this maneuver – also referred to as a Morton’s fork? The lack of opposing bidding should provide a clue. The opponents never bid with 10 spades between them; assume West has the club king along with a decent five-card spade suit. With the diamond ace as well, West would surely have overcalled one spade.

So draw trump ending in dummy, and lead a low diamond towards the jack. If East plays low, you win with the jack, cross to dummy via the heart seven and throw a diamond on the spade king. If East grabs his ace and switches to a club, win the ace, cash the diamond jack, and pitch your clubs on dummy’s three winners.

How will you play today’s spade game when West leads the heart king?

You win immediately, to avoid a potentially fatal diamond switch. You can count eight top tricks: five in trump plus three aces. One heart ruff in dummy would not help you all that much, because you would still need to set up the clubs. Your best chance is to hope for a 3-3 club break.

Play one round of trump, to the king, and then duck the first round of clubs to preserve communications, ensuring that you can use the club ace as an entry on the next round to ruff out the suit. East does best to win and press on with two more rounds of hearts. What now?

If you ruff the third round of hearts, you will go down. You hope to establish the clubs with one ruff, and will then need to draw trump ending in dummy. But you cannot do this if you have taken a ruff on the board. Instead, discard a diamond from dummy on the third round of hearts. Regain the lead, draw a second round of trump with the king, and you can then ruff out clubs and cross to the ace of trumps to discard two diamonds on the good clubs.

What if East switches to the diamond 10 after winning the first club? You would have to rise with the diamond ace to avoid the defenders reverting to hearts, to defeat you. Again, you can ruff out the clubs and draw trump ending in North, then run the clubs.

In today’s deal East and West have no reason to enter the auction, and when North makes a limit raise to three hearts, South should simply bid game and not tip the opponents off to their best lead.

However, when West leads the spade jack, the best play for four hearts is by no means obvious. Declarer is threatened with the loss of four black suit winners if the club honors are badly placed. To avoid the possible threats it looks right to try to set up the diamonds, but you have a choice of strategies.

Best is to draw trump and play the diamond ace then the queen, running it to West, and throwing away a spade loser. If East has the diamond king you avoid losing the second spade. If West has the diamond king, you will be able to throw two clubs away on the diamonds later on by crossing to dummy in trumps.

But there is one more step in the process – and having identified the main thrust of the deal, it would be a shame to fall at the preliminary hurdle. You must duck the first trick both in dummy and in hand, in an attempt to cut defensive communications. Then you win the next spade, before playing on the red suits. If you cover the first spade in dummy or win it in hand, you leave open a line of communication for the defense to cross back and forth in spades, and beat you if West has the diamond king and one or both club honors.

In today’s deal, facing a one diamond opener, North sensibly decided to drive his hand to game, thus responded two clubs. If his side wanted to play hearts it rated to play better from his partner’s side, and the fit could still come to light later. If you respond one heart you can never really describe your assets properly after that.

Now switch to declarer’s seat in three no-trump on a spade lead. After the spade queen holds at trick one, you have seven fast tricks. Where will you find two more? The right thing to do is to try the heart finesse first. When the heart queen holds, you might change tack from your original plan of playing clubs from the top.

The heart finesse is a discovery play, to determine the goal from the club suit, (in other words whether to play for 3-3 clubs or to protect against 4-2 clubs). By taking the heart finesse, you learn how to play clubs. When the finesse wins, you can afford to duck a round of clubs as your safest route to four tricks in the suit, given that dummy is entryless outside the clubs. If the heart finesse had failed, you would have relied on a 3-3 club split.

Incidentally if the hearts in dummy had been 10-9-6-3 you might have led a heart to the queen, then cashed the ace before tackling clubs, since if either the king or jack fell under the ace, you would have had a guaranteed route to nine tricks by setting up a third heart winner for your side.

Facing a strong no-trump, North has just enough to raise to three no-trump; against which West leads the diamond queen.

South should win in dummy, hoping to pin a bare nine or 10 of diamonds in East. He cannot afford to duck, since clubs, not diamonds, are the danger suit. Where does he go for tricks? His best chance is to lead the heart jack, and the moment of truth has arrived for East. If he covers the first heart, declarer will make three heart tricks and his contract.

East must play low, allowing his partner to win with the king, thereby keeping the queen-eight over the 10. That way declarer is limited to two heart tricks, since when declarer leads the 10, East can cover, hoping his partner has the nine. It must be right to cover the second time – if declarer has the nine, East’s queen is dead meat. This way declarer is limited to two heart tricks, and when diamonds do not yield declarer’s extra trick, he has only eight winners.

The general rule is that in second seat one should cover the second, not the first, of touching honors. There are exceptions when you have a doubleton honor, but the rule applies often enough that one should stick with it, and not question it too deeply. This is true whether we are looking at a combination of J-10 or Q-J for declarer or dummy.

Of course as third hand you play third hand high – but that is another story.

A match between Hungary and Belgium, during the European Junior Championships of 2004, threw up the possibility of an interesting line of defense. Even with the sight of all four hands the killing maneuver is not easy to find. So I think Tamas Szalka was due congratulations for finding the play at the table.

Against two spades, West made his natural lead of the heart king. The Belgian South took dummy’s ace, correctly focusing on drawing trump and not allowing the defenders to shift to diamonds, which would have facilitated their chances of finding the ruff.

At trick two, declarer took the spade finesse. In with the trump king, Szalka found the only play to defeat the contract – the diamond six. South played dummy’s 10, and East, Gabor Winkler, won with his king.

The spotlight now shifted to East, and he made no mistake, resisting the urge to cash his heart winner. Instead, he immediately returned a diamond. Declarer tried the nine, but West was able to cover with the jack, neatly locking declarer on the table. Now South was unable to exit from dummy without letting East in to give his partner the diamond ruff, to set the hand.

Had East cashed his side’s heart winner before returning a diamond, declarer could have ruffed a heart back to hand and drawn trump. And had West shifted to the diamond jack at trick three, declarer’s diamond nine would have become a re-entry to his hand.

This may seem like a ‘Heads you win, tails you win’ hand, but it is often easy to overlook suretrick lines. Will you fall into the trap?

When West overcalled one spade over South’s one heart opener, North judged that a negative double was his best way to compete. East made a pre-emptive jump raise and South competed to four diamonds, allowing North to convert to four hearts.

South knew that his partner rated to hold only a doubleton heart, since North would have raised his partner directly with three hearts. But he had no reason to overrule his partner.

When South ruffed away the spade king at trick one, he could see the real risk of his being forced. His next move was to cash the diamond ace and king, then exit with a third diamond, taken by West with the queen as East pitched a club. West persisted with a second spade, ruffed by South again, which left East with the long trump. South could not draw trump now, but he had a neat alternative approach, thanks to dummy’s heart spots.

After ruffing the second spade, he trumped one of his established diamonds in dummy. Then he returned to hand with the club ace, ruffed his last diamond, and still had three trump tricks in hand to bring his total to 10 tricks.

Incidentally, if West had returned a trump at trick five, declarer would have drawn trump, then cashed the long diamonds and club ace, to come to 10 tricks a different way.

In today’s deal the bidding (or lack thereof) gives you a vital clue to the lie of the cards.

When West leads the spade king against six hearts, you win and draw trump in two rounds while ruffing two spades in your hand and one club in the dummy, eliminating the black suits.

West drops the black jacks on the third round of spades and clubs. This tends to suggest that if anyone holds four diamonds, it will be him. Another clue is that if West had a singleton diamond and 10 cards in the black suits, with a known good spade suit, he would surely have bid over one heart.

Taking all of this into account, you should lead the diamond eight, planning to run it. If East wins with a singleton nine, jack or queen, he will have to concede a ruff-and-discard with his return. If he wins and is able to return a diamond, the suit will break 3-2. At the table, if West covers the diamond eight, you will win dummy’s diamond ace and continue with a low diamond toward your 10. West will win the trick, but must then lead away from his remaining diamond honor, or give a ruff-and-sluff.

If the auction or play had led you to believe that East had the diamond length, you would instead cash the diamond ace and lead low toward your 10. When East rises with the queen or jack on the second round, he would then have to lead into your diamond tenace or concede the ruff-sluff.

Looking at the North-South hands, wouldn’t you expect 12 tricks to be made every day of the week? There are six top winners in the red suits, and five in the black suits. Declarer can test clubs and fall back on the spade finesse if necessary…can’t he? Up to a point, yes; but sometimes the defenders can force declarer to commit himself prematurely, and that is so in today’s deal, though it may not be obvious at first or even second glance.

At the table, the bidding saw North make a quantitative jump to four no-trump and South found a scientific way to explore for a minor-suit slam, settling in six no-trump when no club fit came to light.

When West led the diamond jack against the slam, South won with the queen. He led a heart to the king and then led back to the 10. West ducked twice, won the third heart and returned the diamond 10.

Now declarer was at the crossroads. In dummy for the last time, he had to decide what to discard on the other top diamond. Aware that the 3-3 break was against the odds, he chose to discard his small club and take the spade finesse, to go two off.

Declarer might have considered testing the clubs after two rounds of hearts were ducked, though if the hand with four clubs also has the heart ace, the contract would now fail. This seems the best line to me; but whatever the case, the credit should go to West for his thoughtful defense.