Assume you’re declarer at four spades and West leads the ace and another diamond, which you ruff. You lead the ten of spades, which wins, and then the jack, taken by West with the ace. West shifts to a heart, won by East with the ace, and East returns the king of diamonds.

It doesn’t matter whether you ruff high or low — in either case West sooner or later scores his nine of trump, and down you go. That’s the story if you played the hand this way, but naturally there’s more to it than that. The question is whether you can figure out how to make the contract — and it can be made — now that you know how the East-West cards are divided.

As with most problems of this type, the solution is easy once you’ve seen it. If you’d like to work it out for yourself, stop reading right here; if not, here’s the way it’s done:

Obviously, you have to try to do something to keep West from getting a second trump trick. To that end, after ruffing the diamond jack at trick two, you should lead a club and trump it in dummy!

Now play the third round of diamonds and, when East produces the king, discard a heart (instead of ruffing). This hands East-West their second trick, but the only other one they can get is the ace of trump. East is out of diamonds, and there is nothing else he can return to injure you.

The effect of this “loser on loser” play is that it removes a potential threatening card (the king of diamonds) from East’s hand at the same time as you dispose of a heart — which was a loser in any case.

It is not important that you wind up losing two diamond tricks instead of a heart and a diamond. What is important is that you lose only one trump trick instead of two.

Tomorrow >> Famous Hand.

— Steve Becker