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.

Sometimes second hand high by the defense will start a completely wrong train of thought for declarer. On this deal, my regular teammate, Hugh Ross, was caught out by the ingenious defense of Vino Bisht of the Netherlands.

The defense to three no-trump started with a diamond to the ace and a low club from dummy, on which Bisht imaginatively rose with the queen! He could see that unless his partner had both the club king and jack, three no-trump was virtually bound to make. He shifted to the diamond 10, and Ross decided to duck this trick. That play would have been correct if he kept West off play and neutralized the diamonds, and the play thus far had persuaded Ross that East had either the club king or jack. By contrast, covering the diamond 10 might have let West duck the trick; now when East got on lead in clubs, another diamond through would spell curtains for the contract.

However Bisht could now clear the diamonds, and Ross took the fourth round of the suit, then played a club to the ace and another club. He assumed that East, the nondanger hand, would take this trick; instead van Oppen won and cashed the fifth diamond for one down.

In the other room, Hans Kreyns won the diamond ace and led a club to the eight and jack. He ducked the diamond return, won the fourth round of the suit, then ducked a club to East and had nine tricks.

In today's deal both tables played three no-trump, but at one table it was North who was declarer; in the other room it was South.

Where North was declarer, the lead was the spade jack, and declarer won in hand with the queen, and still had two spade guards left, while needing to knock out the ace and king of diamonds. So he had no trouble coming to 10 tricks.

In the other room West led the spade five in the auction shown. Declarer captured East’s king with his ace, and West won the first diamond and pressed on with spades. Now the defenders could set up their spades while retaining the diamond ace as an entry to the suit, beating the game by two tricks. How many mistakes were made here?

The last mistake was declarer’s. If he ducks the spade king, the defenders cannot both set up and cash out the spades, since when West wins the diamond king he will have no spades left. And there is no shift that will help the defenders at trick two.

However, East was also at fault. The opening lead made it clear that declarer held two spade stoppers. With just one side-entry, East should compel South to use one of those stoppers at once, by declining to cover dummy’s singleton spade queen.

Now when West gets in with the diamond king, he can establish the spade suit before East’s diamond ace is removed.

The Italians currently have the world's best team, but bridge is a game of mistakes and they make theirs, just like everyone else, even if not quite so many as other people. See if you can improve on the Italian cardplay on this deal.

Against South’s four hearts, reached after an uninterrupted auction, West led the club four, playing third and lowest leads, to the king and ace, and East switched to the spade queen. The Italian declarer won in hand, ruffed a club, played a heart to his ace, and ruffed his last club with the heart jack. Now he played a diamond to the king and ace, followed by a spade to his ace and another spade, won by East’s jack. East got off lead with the diamond jack, and when declarer played the heart king, he found the bad break, which meant he had to lose two more trump tricks one way or another.

The winning line is to play a spade in the four-card ending. East ruffs this and either plays a trump — allowing the finesse — or a club, which declarer can ruff low in hand and overruff in the dummy, to lead a diamond for the trump coup.

There were good reasons to suspect trumps were going to break 4-1. The 5-2 diamond break looked highly probable, and East was known to have precisely three spades. Moreover, West’s lead of the club four (once East had released the club three) meant he strongly rated to have led from a five-card suit.

This hand was reported as a missed opportunity rather than as a play actually found, suggesting it was too difficult to find at the table, though these things are often easier on paper than in real life. When this hand occurred in the Blue Ribbon pairs a few years ago, East's weak two-spade bid provoked his opponents into overbidding to game.

In the typical auction shown here, South’s three-club bid showed values (without them he would have bid two no-trump), and NorthSouth then drove to three no-trump. South ducked the lead of the spade 10 and won the next spade. His natural play was to finesse the club queen, lay down the ace, and play a third round of clubs, achieving his aim of setting up the clubs without letting East get the lead.

However, at the end of trick two, West could perhaps have foreseen the location of all the high cards. What would have happened if West had contributed the club 10 on the first round of the suit?

Declarer knows that he is safe if this is a true card from the K-J-10; but what if West has K-10 doubleton — in that case, playing clubs from the top would let East win the third round of clubs and cash his spades. Therefore, South may well decide to duck the second club, to keep East off lead. Of course, if South makes this play, East wins the club jack, and can cash out for one down.