Bidding More to Show Less
By Mike Lawrence

The winning play is called a dummy reversal. When West led the third round of hearts, South must ruff with a high one, not the ten. Play one high spade out of your hand to make sure they divide at least 4-1. When both of your opponents follow, you can almost claim.

Go to dummy with the queen of clubs and ruff the last heart with your remaining high trump honor. This leaves you with the singleton ten of spades. There are still three trumps out and because you still have the ten of spades, you can overtake it with the jack, draw trumps and claim. Dummy's hearts are all gone and the third small diamond in dummy will be discarded on your good clubs.

This line gives you eleven sure tricks and requires only that clubs aren't divided eight-zero. As you can see, the clubs are not eight-zero, but they are almost that bad. The seven-one split means that West will ruff the second round of clubs and one of your tricks will go up in smoke.

Remember. When you have a choice of ruffing one suit in dummy or another suit in your hand, always consider which is the safer approach. Learning to look at a hand from both perspectives is an important skill.

Imagine this scenario and decide if you have not seen it before. You put down your dummy for partner. Your hand includes four trumps, a singleton in a side suit, and the K109763 of another.

They lead your singleton suit and your partner wins the opening lead in his hand.

What do you expect your partner to do next?

If you said that you expect him to continue the suit they led and ruff it in dummy, you are right. You are right that this is the line of play found routinely my declarers around the world. But it is possible that this is not a good line. Your K109763 side suit may be the key to the hand. Perhaps your partner should be setting up this suit rather than ruffing things in dummy.

Care to know more about Dummy Reversals, one of the least understood of dummy play techniques? You will find many examples of them in Private Bridge Lessons, Volume Two. Just look in the software section for a further discussion of this and other software products.