[barmar]

http://tinyurl.com/4hmfaze
At all tables, West leads its singleton ♦.

If you win the first trick in dummy and lead a low ♠ towards your hand, East grabs his Ace, cashes ♥A, and gives West its ♦ ruff, holding you to 4.

If you win the first trick in hand, lead a ♠ to dummy, East wins the Acs, cashes ♥A, and then switches to a ♣, letting you make 5.

I played the first way, thinking that winning in dummy would make it look like the lead was from the Queen, and it wouldn't find the ruff.

Notice that in neither case does it find the defense to set the contract, which is to give a ruff at trick 3, return to East with a ♥, and give a second ruff. That may be because it doesn't know about suit preference signals when giving ruffs. But even if West doesn't find the correct exit, it's no worse off. What's the rush to take the ♥A, it's not going anywhere?

P.S. How do I insert the actual hand diagram, rather than a link to it, in a post?

[Bbradley62]

barmar, on 2011-February-25, 23:14, said:

P.S. How do I insert the actual hand diagram, rather than a link to it, in a post?

Go to http://online.bridge...hands/index.php and enter your name and the timeframe to find the hand. (If you've just completed a tournament, it takes a few minutes for those hands to get imported.)

RIght-click on the word "Movie" on the line of the hand you want, to get the properties. That will look something like this:
"http://www.bridgebase.com/tools/handviewer.html?myhand=M-2477207-1298694421"
You'll paste the "myhand=..." part into this text:
(hv=myhand=M-2477207-1298694421)400|300(/hv)
but use brackets instead of parentheses to make this:

---

The 400 and 300 are the dimensions of the picture, which you can adjust.