The opening lead is the pivotal card in many defences. It’s a unique card too, the only card played without a sight of dummy. Because there’s no dummy to help you, you have to fall back on tried-and-tested winning formulae and versus notrumps, that’s generally leading the “fourth from the top of the longest and strongest suit”. The reason for leading your longest suit v notrumps is to exhaust the opponents of their cards of the suit, so you can win tricks with your small left-over cards.

So after an unrevealing 2NT-3NT auction by the opponents, lead ♥4 from:

it wouldn’t be a big deal to lead  ♥2 rather than ♥4, but an aspiring partner would think “ah, if ♥2 is my partner’s fourth highest, he has only four hearts”. So stick with ♥4.

Change your hand to:

and now it would be a mistake to lead ♥4. This risks declarer winning cheaply with say ♥10. When your long suit is headed by three touching* honours, lead the top of the sequence. So lead ♥K. That way you’ll force out ♥A.

*Or near-touching: lead ♥K from ♥KQ1042.

Declarer correctly rose with dummy’s ♦ Q on ♦ 6 lead. He then led ♥ QJ (ducked) and ♥ 7 to West’s ♥ A. On this trick East discarded ♠ 9 (“throw high means aye”), so West switched to ♠ J. East won ♠ A and led ♦ 10, crucially through declarer’s ♦ K. West now had to score ♦ AJ93. Down two.

4 ♥ would make 10 tricks, losing just ♠ A, ♦ A and ♥ A. Game made.

If you remember just one thing...
Explore for eight-card major-suit fits until neither can exist.

West (irritatingly) led a trump and the tall declarer surveyed his chances. Say I crossed to the ace of diamonds, ruffed a diamond, crossed to the queen of clubs and ruffed a third diamond. Probably no king of diamonds would have appeared (in the longer length). If I then crossed to the ace of clubs and ruffed the fourth diamond with my last trump, how would I cross to dummy to draw trumps and enjoy the long diamond? I couldn’t – the player without the king of diamonds would throw a club on the fourth diamond, his partner would then win the spade and give a club ruff.

So perhaps I should take the diamond finesse. But I was loath to go down at trick two (by seeing a diamond to the queen lose to the king).

I reverted to the first plan and sought an improvement. Aha! The penny dropped. Cross to the ace of diamonds, ruff a diamond, cross to the queen of clubs and ruff a diamond. If both opponents have followed to three diamonds but no king appeared, I now make the small change to my original plan of cashing the king of clubs before leading to dummy’s ace (key play).

If clubs split 3-3, I can now ruff a fourth diamond (with my last trump) and lead the long club throwing dummy’s spade. I succeed even on 4-1 trumps, as I must score the last four tricks in dummy withthe three trumps and the fifth diamond). I’ll make my slam if either the king of diamonds is trebleton or clubs are 3-3. (And experts love either-or lines of play).

Very disappointingly, though, after cashing the king of clubs and leading a third club to dummy, West ruffed. He led a second trump and I was soon conceding down two. There had been no way to win.

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