Which Hand?
By Andy Hung.

Here's a common question that we may ask ourselves, and that is, "Which hand should I ruff losers in?"

Bidding.

As North–South we are able to find our 4♠ contract through inferential bidding on this deal.

There are two passes to us as we open 1NT (not ideal with the small doubleton Diamond, but it is the best we can do. We may find it difficult to limit our hand later in the auction – a 1NT opening gets the essence of our hand "off our chest" so to speak)

In response North trots out a 2♣ Stayman enquiry to ask for a four-card major.

With 4-4 in the majors it is correct to bid Hearts first and when North jumps  to 3NT, a clear message indicating that he doesn't like Hearts, the inference can be made that North must have four Spades (why bid Stayman with no four-card major?)

With North’s four Spades evident by inference we remove 3NT to 4♠, thus ending the auction.

Play.

West, holding a weak hand, bypasses the traditional “fourth best from his longest and strongest” opening lead and opts for the ♣10 lead instead. Why? Well, with a hopeless hand in defense it can be right to lead shortages, hoping for ruffs. When we have a very weak hand it is likely that partner has useful honors and one of the ways to defeat a suit contract is to establish a ruff in a side-suit. With that idea in mind, West tries his luck with a Club lead and leads (as ever) the higher card from a doubleton.

Let's now Count and Plan. This Club lead, straight into the ♣A Q tenace, reduces our Club losers to one. We have to lose a Spade (we can hardly avoid losing a trick to the Ace of trumps!) so the focus of this deal is on not losing two red-suit tricks.

A count of winners helps here as well. We have three Spades, two Hearts, one Diamond and two Clubs – so we have eight winners. Should we draw three rounds of trumps we’d suffer defeat as we’d run out of steam (and tricks). The aim should be to ruff a couple of losers before drawing trumps.

Remember – with insufficient winners it is unwise to draw trumps. Now… with a doubleton Heart in dummy and a doubleton Diamond in hand there is a question to answer. Should we try to ruff Hearts in dummy, or should we try to ruff Diamonds in the closed hand?

Usually we want to adopt the "ruff losers in the short trump hand" strategy but here, on this hand, we are in a 4–4 fit. Either hand could be the long or short trump hand, it is up to us to decide what to do. Note that is often wrong (often, not always) to ruff in both hands. One hand should aim to keep four trumps so that we can draw the opponents’ later.

Here, the power of the intermediate Spade cards may help us choose which hand to ruff in. With the high intermediate Spades in the closed hand, it is best to go for ruffs in dummy, because if we start ruffing losers with our big Spades (the ♠8, ♠9, ♠10), we may run into some awkward communication problems if trumps prove to be 4–1.

In fact, holding the ♥A K, it becomes clear to go after the Hearts because we don't need to give up the lead there. If we were to ruff Diamonds in our hand we'd have to give up a Diamond first.

Anyway, after winning the ♣Q, we should play off the ♥A K and then a third Heart. When West shows up with the ♥Q on the third round we should play it safe by ruffing it with a high trump in dummy. Yes, we can see here, with hindsight, that ruffing low is just as good, but a cunning West might have started off with ♥Q 10 9 7 4 and may try to seduce us into ruffing low by playing the ♥Q on the third round of Hearts.

After ruffing high, we try to cross back to our hand by playing a low trump to the ♠8. East takes his ♠A (playing low would be far stronger defense) in order to play the ♣K to knock out our Ace and, as luck would have it, West is unable to ruff. East must have read his partner's Club lead as a singleton but that, frankly, is ridiculous.

[Why? Because we have shown four Spades and four Hearts and have opened 1NT. Can we really have four Clubs as well? Doh!]

After the ♣A it's all downhill. We continue with another Heart ruff and then draw the remaining trumps.

All in all, we lose just one Spade, one Diamond, and one Club. We make five Spades, two Hearts, one Diamond and two Clubs.