When declarer is running a suit, the advice given by bridge teachers is to keep length parity with dummy, unless the bidding or play has suggested otherwise. A defender should also make every effort to tell his partner which suit to keep.

Against three no-trump West led the fourth-highest of his longest and strongest suit, the spade seven. Declarer rose with dummy’s 10, more in hope than expectation, and East covered this with the queen. South ducked this trick, and also played low on the second spade. West carefully overtook the spade eight, but how should he plan the play thereafter?

West has two opportunities to clarify where his re-entry is located. He can win the second spade with the jack rather than the king, and at trick three should return his lowest spade, the six, as a suit-preference signal for the lower-ranking of the red suits. (He could hardly be interested in a club return with those clubs on view in the dummy.) Had West held the heart ace instead of the diamond ace, he should win the second spade with the king and play back the jack.

After taking the spade ace, declarer will continue with four rounds of clubs. Ignoring the principle of matching dummy’s length, East should then discard a diamonds on the third round of clubs, and another diamond on the fourth, retaining all four hearts. Declarer can then come to no more than eight tricks.

In today's deal it is fortunate for North-South that South can open one spade in front of East. (If East were able to open one diamond, doubtless East-West would reach their cold game of five diamonds.) As it is, West does not have enough for the unusual two no-trump to show the minors, and North can then blow East out of the water with a jump to four spades.

The spade game appears very straightforward to make, when the defenders cannot arrange to take a heart ruff. West starts off with a top diamond lead, and you ruff, planning to draw trumps and claim. However the 3-0 trump break sets you back on your heels. You can draw a second round of trump if you want, but then you have to be careful. Suppose declarer ruffs a second diamond before playing clubs. If he does, then East will hop up with the club ace and play a third diamond, and now declarer cannot enjoy dummy’s clubs after drawing trump.

Declarer should realize that his best chance to make his game is that the defenders will not or cannot take a heart ruff. At trick three, instead of ruffing a diamond, declarer plays a top club from hand. East can win and does best to return a second diamond to force dummy to ruff. Declarer simply ruffs in dummy, unblocks clubs, then draws trump ending in dummy. He can now cash two clubs to pitch two losers and concede two heart tricks at the end.

Although it looks normal to play four spades unsuccessfully here, two tables found their way to the reasonable three-no-trump contract after South decided nine tricks would be easier than 10. Only one declarer, however, saw a way to persuade his opponents to help him come home with his contract.

Against the no-trump game both Wests chose the diamond two for their opening lead. One South played low from dummy, hoping that West’s holding in the suit included the jack. It did, but after taking his ace, East saw that he couldn’t persist with diamonds without giving declarer a trick in the suit. Accordingly, he switched to the club queen. Declarer held off and won the club continuation. All now depended on guessing who held the heart queen. In an attempt to get a count on the hand, South cashed the five spade winners, but this hardly helped him. He then decided (correctly) that East had probably started with more hearts than his partner and so finessed into the West hand. Unlucky!

At the other table, South saw he could avoid the heart guess if he could persuade the defenders to continue diamonds. At trick one he put up the diamond queen from the table and East won with the ace. South dropped first the four from hand, then the nine on the continuation. Placing his partner with an original three-card diamond holding, West led a third round of diamonds. South now won nine tricks without needing to resort to the heart guess.

There are few truly original bridge writers, whose deals not only make you think but also are a pleasure to read. One author whose work I never fail to enjoy is Julian Pottage of Wales. Today's deal comes from a relatively recent book of his called "A Great Deal of Bridge Problems."

Imagine the play in five clubs after you have ruffed the opening lead of the spade king — there are two quite plausible approaches. Say you cross to a trump and lead a diamond to the king and ace. Back comes a trump, and you win in dummy to play a second diamond, won by West, who leads a second trump. Twist and turn as you might, you can no longer make the hand.

You would never do that, would you? You would lead a heart to dummy at trick two and play a diamond to the king and ace. However, the defenders now play back a heart and East will win the second diamond to give his partner a ruff unless you draw trump. If you do that, there will be no diamond ruff in dummy!

The trap to avoid is trying to get to dummy to lead up to your diamond king. However you try to do this, you will go down as the cards lie. But the solution is simply to lead a diamond from your own hand at trick two. Now you cannot be prevented from making 11 tricks.

In today's deal West led the heart eight against four spades, and East took his ace, on which South false carded with the jack. East refrained from giving his partner an immediate ruff; that would be two tricks for the defense, but since his partner had one significant high card at most, they would get at most one diamond trick. He had to hope that the defense could get two diamond tricks at once, so the right defense was to play a diamond at the second trick.

So far so good, but East then considered that if he switched to a low diamond, South might not play the king. Might South duck — calculating that West had the diamond ace because wouldn’t East have given his partner an immediate ruff if he had an ace as a reentry? If South ducked, East would no longer have an entry for the heart ruff.

East decided that it must be better to shift to a high diamond first, thus remaining on lead if South were to duck. He then avoided the second trap, of leading the diamond queen. Had he done so, West might quite reasonably have led three rounds of the suit, trying to give his partner an overruff in that suit. Instead, East played the diamond 10, covered by the king and ace. West returned the diamond jack, and East overtook to give his partner the heart ruff.

“What took you so long to give me the ruff?” was all the thanks he got.

When South makes a jump shift at his second turn, there is a case for North to rebid spades rather than raise diamonds. However, his actual choice made reaching slam much easier.

The play in six diamonds should develop in straightforward fashion. South wins the opening lead with the club ace, cashes the trump ace to find the bad news, then must play the top hearts, discarding clubs from table.

East ruffs the third heart and plays back a club to force dummy to ruff, a play that is as good as anything for the defense. After ruffing, declarer must now lead the spade king, planning to take the ruffing finesse. East covers and South trumps, then ruffs a club back to dummy and discards his heart losers on the two spade winners. All that remains is to finesse against East’s trump queen, and declarer can claim his 12 tricks.

East does better to discard a spade on the third heart, rather than ruffing in. Now declarer ruffs a club to dummy and leads the spade king, covered and ruffed.

Declarer ruffs another club to dummy and throws a heart on the spade queen. Then he leads dummy’s last spade winner, overruffs East, and ruffs his heart loser with the diamond jack. East can now score just one trump trick whatever he does.

In today's deal, played in a pairs event, North took the reasonable approach of not disclosing his four-card trump support at his first turn, since he had such a balanced hand, but of subsequently competing to the three-level because he knew his side had a nine-card trump fit.

Since West could only have been stopped from taking nine tricks in a club contract via a trump promotion, the onus for his side was to extract as much as possible from defending a spade partscore. With the opponents vulnerable, plus 100 would represent an average score, plus 200 an excellent one.

The club king held the first trick, East echoing to suggest not only a doubleton club, but also a spade higher than dummy’s biggest trump, West shifted to the heart jack. (The heart nine would also have sufficed, but as you can see, a small heart would not have worked if declarer had guessed to duck in dummy.) The defense now took its three top heart tricks and reverted to clubs. West won the trick and played a third club, and since East was able to overruff dummy, the defense had six tricks and all the matchpoints.

The trap for the defense was to avoid taking the club ruff before playing on hearts. Had they done so, then dummy’s vulnerable heart suit would have been protected from attack. Declarer wins the trump or diamond return and takes nine tricks with East making just the heart ace at the end.

This Christmas I'd like to look back on the life of Seymon Deutsch, who died June 13.

We met in San Antonio in late 1953 and stayed friends for life. Although he had a 20-year hiatus from bridge, Seymon is the only player ever to win both the Rosenblum Cup and the Olympiad Teams in the World Bridge Games.

Seymon was generous, personable, upbeat and fun-loving. He had a house in Aspen, which allowed me as president of the WBF in the summer of 1993 to have a management meeting there at the Little Nell Hotel. With Seymon’s help it turned out to be a spectacular location, and the best WBF management meeting ever.

He lived a very active, productive life with a wonderful family — a beautiful and lovely wife Linda, together with his four children. The family was very active in the Joe Brand store, which was a showplace in Laredo and attracted people from far and wide. It was established by his father-in-law, but Seymon ran it for nearly 40 years.

Here is Seymon at a 1980s national championships. He bypassed his weak four-card heart suit at his first turn, getting him to the no-trump game. Then, when the spade queen held the first trick, Seymon innocently led a low diamond from dummy to trick two. When East neglected to put in the eight, Seymon inserted the seven, keeping East off lead. This maneuver set up the diamonds while shutting out East, so the spade king would remain protected.

North-South did well to reach an excellent game contract with their limited values in this deal, but South spoilt the effect by missing a logical point in the play.

The key to reaching game was South’s optimistic decision to reverse into two hearts. Over North’s (forcing by agreement) three-diamond call, South took a shot at five diamonds. West led the club king, on which East signaled with his queen.

South now decided there was nothing to the play. He required either the spade finesse to be right, or East to hold the heart ace. Accordingly he drew trump and took a losing spade finesse. Later he lost two hearts and so went one down.

South commented after the hand that he could have made the hand by leading a low spade from dummy to his king, but that there was no reason why East would be more likely to hold the spade king than West.

True enough — but South had overlooked something critical. West, who was marked with both top clubs from the play to the first trick, might also hold the spade king but could hardly hold the heart ace as well, for he had dealt and passed.

So leading a low spade from dummy after drawing one round of trump was the right way to play the suit. If East had the king, South would obtain two discards on the spades, and if West turned up with the king, it would have been certain that East would hold the heart ace.