When West leads a low trump against six spades what should your plan be, as East follows to the first round of trump?

Rather than focusing on the deficiencies of dummy when it comes to high cards, you should concentrate on the deal, and realize that you have an inevitable diamond loser but can ruff two of your diamonds in dummy. You can make your slam by relying on either one of the club or heart finesses (each one in principle being a 50% chance).

However if you can, you should seek to find a way to combine those two chances. Your secondary chance here is to ruff out the heart king in three rounds; you will combine this with the club finesse.

So you win the trump lead, cash the heart ace and ruff a heart high. You then cross to the spade jack (drawing the last trump) and ruff another heart. Next you give up a diamond, preparing for two diamond ruffs in the dummy. If the heart king fell from either defender, you will discard the club queen on the established heart winner after taking a diamond ruff. Otherwise you will finesse the club queen, taking your second chance. Just for the record, your additional chance improves your original 50 percent odds to 60 percent — not to be sneezed at.

This problem comes from a bridge book for beginners (this being one of the tougher hands), Planning the Play of a Bridge Hand, by Barbara Seagram & David Bird.

In his contract of three no-trump, declarer formed a master plan, with a fallback plan ready to go. Unfortunately he missed one small detail, and his house of cards collapsed.

Against the no-trump game West led the spade queen. Declarer won in hand and saw that the quickest way to his contract was to take four club tricks. This was Plan A, so at trick two he led a low club to the king. If the king held, his intention was to return to hand in diamonds in order to lead a second club up. Should the ace still not have appeared, he was ready to resort to Plan B – the heart suit. Even with the heart king offside, three heart tricks plus two in each of the other suits would add up to nine tricks.

But South’s plan had overlooked one minuscule detail. The club he initially chose to lead toward dummy was the three. East won with the ace and returned a spade. Declarer won and played a second club to the queen, and when East showed out the suit was irretrievably blocked. So Plan B had to be put into action. When the heart king was offside the game was sunk.

Declarer could have allowed for this distribution of the club suit by leading the nine at the first opportunity, and later unblocking the eight as well. The three could then have been utilized for a finesse of the seven.

Here is a defensive problem for you this week, so you may choose to cover up the East and South hands before you read on, putting yourself fully in West's shoes.

In my view the opening lead against three no-trump is far from clear-cut. It is nearly certain that South holds the guarded spade queen, so leading a low spade may well give the ninth trick, while leading a top spade also risks severing communications between the two defensive hands. However, at most tables West did lead a top spade, and continued with a second top spade at trick two, East discarding a discouraging club. What now?

This deal occurred in the round-robin match from the 2008 Olympiad between the German and Dutch women’s teams. The play had started identically, but now the paths diverged. The Dutch West continued with a third spade. Declarer won, conceded a club, and was soon able to claim the remainder of the tricks.

This line of defense was surely an error by West, as there is no room for East to hold a club honor and the diamond ace, so you have no realistic chance both to set up spades and cash them.

At the other table, the German West (Daniela von Arnim) found the better defense of switching to a low diamond. Dummy’s 10 was covered by the queen and ace. Declarer played ace and another club, and when East won and continued diamonds, this set up enough diamond tricks to defeat the hand.

One of the most interesting play or defend problems from the summer nationals last July in Atlanta confronted Glenn Milgrim, who declared three spades doubled, after some optimistic bidding from both members of his partnership.

Milgrim won the club lead and ducked a diamond to East, Richard Oshlag, who resisted the temptation to play trumps when declarer would have set up the diamonds. Instead, he carefully reverted to clubs to kill the dummy entry.

Oshlag won the heart exit from dummy to play a trump, and declarer could take only two aces and six trump tricks when West, Paul Munafo, ducked his trump king.

Afterwards, Milgrim was kicking himself for missing a beautiful play. The way home at trick four is to play the diamond ace and ruff a diamond, after which you must ruff a club — but take care to ruff with the spade ace.

When dummy next leads a winning diamond, East must ruff in and declarer overruffs. If West discards, declarer will ruff a club in dummy for his ninth trick, so West must overruff and cash a heart. He must then exit with a trump to stop the crossruff, but thanks to that earlier high ruff, declarer can overtake dummy’s spade jack with his queen, draw trumps, and give up a club. He still has a trump to go with his fifth and master club. His nine tricks are four trumps in hand, the diamond ace, two clubs and two ruffs.

The junior and schools teams championships were contested in Atlanta last summer. When the last board of the Australia-Turkey semifinals started, Turkey had a comfortable lead.

Both tables in the match reached six clubs and the Australian East, led and continued diamonds, forcing declarer, Berk Gokce, to ruff. Gokce played his club ace and saw the trump void in West. He followed with dummy’s small trump to this trick, a slight but fatal error.

He next cashed the top hearts and ruffed the third heart with the trump queen in dummy. Then came a trump from dummy, which East covered with the nine and declarer won with the 10. Now declarer went to dummy with the spade king and led dummy’s remaining trump, the eight.

This time East did not cover, and declarer could not let the eight hold or he would be stranded in dummy, so had to overtake and eventually concede the setting trick to the trump jack.

Declarer had to unblock the club seven or eight under his ace on the first round of trump. Then he would have been left with the club two in the dummy in the ending. He would have finessed in clubs, ending up in his hand.

When slam made in the other room after a diamond lead and spade shift (and yes, the contract should have been defeated after that start), Australia qualified for the finals, where they lost to a strong American team.

Kit Woolsey reported this deal to the Daily Bulletin as a missed opportunity from the Grand National Teams event at the Atlanta Nationals last summer.

When North opens a Precision diamond, showing diamonds or a minimum balanced hand, East doubles and you,as South, end up not in the laydown six diamonds but in three no-trump. When West leads a fourth-highest heart three, you have your work cut out to avoid turning your bad board into a catastrophe.

There are two plausible lines that spring to mind. The first is to win the heart ace, unblock spades, lead a diamond to the ace, cash the spades, and play a club to your jack. Now, with no entries to dummy, you will need to find East with a doubleton club king. Not impossible, but unlikely.

The second line is to take the heart ace, play the spade ace, then overtake your spade jack to take the club finesse. Then you can try to guess diamonds. The problem here is that you have only gained your extra entry to dummy at the cost of a spade trick. Both of these lines fail. However, you may feel you should have spotted the winning line when I show it to you.

Win the heart ace, cash the spade ace and jack, then cut loose with a heart. After four rounds of hearts, the opponents will have to lead a spade or a club (West being void in diamonds) and give you the extra dummy entry you need.

Mark Itabashi and Ross Grabel won the von Zedtwitz Life Master Pairs in Atlanta last summer. The following deal helped their cause.

If the defenders lead a heart against four spades, declarer wins, tests trumps, then plays on clubs. Whatever the defenders do, he can arrange to set up clubs and neutralize West’s trumps to make 10 tricks.

However, Itabashi actually led the diamond 10 to the ace. Declarer thought it would be smooth sailing until he ran into an unexpected surprise middeal. He played two rounds of trumps, revealing the annoying 4-1 split, and now had to go after clubs. Declarer played a club to the 10, which held the trick. Believing that there were 11 easy tricks available at this point, declarer crossed to another trump in dummy and played a club to the nine. Itabashi now produced the queen and led another diamond.

South’s hand was now dead. Whether he drew the last trump or knocked out the club ace first, there was no way to make the contract. The best he could have done was play the heart ace and ruff a heart, but that still yieldeded only nine tricks. He actually cleared clubs, and now Itabashi won to return yet another trump and doom declarer to two down.

Just for the record, the only winning line today after a diamond lead is to play on clubs after drawing just one round of trumps. Then declarer can arrange either to ruff hearts in hand or establish the clubs.

Sometimes virtue is not rewarded and crime goes unpunished. In this deal from last year's Summer Nationals in Atlanta, one could argue that the result was more humorous than tragic — but it does depend a little on which side of the table you were sitting.

Bobby Levin, West, gave the Daily Bulletin the following deal to see if its readers knew their textbook plays. You lead the spade seven against one no-trump, which goes to the king, ace, and two. East now plays back the spade 10, which goes to South’s jack. Declarer leads the heart two, to your three, dummy’s seven, and the 10. Partner now plays the spade eight to dislodge declarer’s queen. What do you discard?

Levin could reconstruct the whole hand. South’s failure to raise hearts suggested he had a doubleton heart and so East had the Q-J-10. Therefore, to create an entry to his partner’s hand, the right play was to jettison the heart ace. Now declarer could no longer establish hearts without letting East cash out that suit.

Right play but the wrong hand for this maneuver as you will see when you look at the full diagram. After Bobby’s discard, declarer had no trouble in leading a heart to the king, dropping East’s queen, and now ran hearts for plus 120 and all the matchpoints.

Still, at least Levin could be consoled that it got him into the newspaper — and thanks, Bobby, for being such a good sport as to report it!

The summer nationals are currently being held in Las Vegas. Therefore all the deals this week come from last year's national championships held in Atlanta.

Imagine that you have reached three no-trump on this deal. (You may not like that first double, but that is what happened at the table, and the options are not especially attractive.) The defenders lead hearts, of course, and can set up their suit while still apparently retaining plenty of entries with which to get in and cash out their suit. Does declarer have any chance now?

As Edgar Kaplan said, where there are eight tricks there are always nine. Declarer can reasonably expect East to be 5-5 in the majors and thus to be the hand brought under pressure.

Declarer simply wins the heart ace and runs five clubs. On the last club, East (who can keep only seven cards) is caught in a triple-squeeze. He wants to hold onto the spade K-Q, his four remaining hearts and the guarded diamond king — but the laws do not permit that.

If East pitches a spade or a diamond, you get your extra tricks from that suit at once. If he lets go of a heart, you can duck a spade and set up that suit, and the opponents will have only three heart tricks to cash before you get in with the diamond ace and take the two further spade winners that you need for your contract.