Ending up in a 5 Diamond contract, your losers could be one
Spade, two Hearts, and perhaps one Diamond when opponents are
3-1 in the suit. West leads the Club Queen to your winning
honor – now what? Clearly, you want to ruff two rounds of
Hearts. On this holding, you can afford to play two rounds of
trump; when one opponent shows out after the second trump, you
acknowledge they will win their Diamond Queen. Using the Rule of
1, you do not play a third Club this time. Instead cash your
Heart Ace, ruff a Heart, come back to your hand and ruff a
second Heart. Hopefully you prepared for this strategy before
you played on trick one and won with the dummy’s Club King
rather than your Club Ace! Otherwise, how will you get back to
declarer’s hand? No, playing a Spade won’t help; seeing your ruffing strategy, the opponents win the trick and cash their
Club Queen to knock out your last trump in dummy. Oops. That
would be the same problem as if we were to play 3 rounds of
trump. So the Rule of 1 has its place but we still need to plan
ahead, this time keeping an entry to declarer hand. Let’s try
another one.
Our contract is a small slam, 6 Spades.
West leads the
Heart King which we win and put on our thinking cap. Our losers
could be three Diamonds, one Heart, and maybe a Spade. Of
course, we envision pitching a Heart loser and several Diamonds
on the lovely dummy Clubs. Declarer should probe with two rounds
of trump Spades – this time beginning with the dummy’s Spade
King so we will be in declarer’s hand on the second play of the
Spade Ace, ensuring transportation for future ruffing. Again,
one opponent shows out on the second Spade so they have a
winning Spade Queen. The Rule of 1 warns us to consider
alternatives before blindly playing a third losing trump. Here’s
our cards at this point:
If we play a third Spade, the opponents win the trick and
cash their Heart Queen to set the contract. Then how about
winning the Diamond Ace, ruffing a Diamond, returning to our
hand with the Club Ace, and ruffing a second Diamond? We would
have one remaining Diamond and one Club. If we tried pitching
them on the dummy Clubs, down we go! We have eight Clubs, the
opponents five, so with a 3-2 split, they will ruff a Diamond
and cash their remaining Heart winner. How about the brute force
approach, attacking the Clubs straight away?
Yes, this is the
winning line: we begin playing the Club Ace and play a low Club
to dummy’s King; so far, so good. Then we begin running our
Clubs – if an opponent ruffs, we pitch our Heart on the loser, a neat
sluffing tactic, playing a loser on
loser. Now we can win our Diamond Ace, ruff a
Diamond in dummy, and pitch like crazy on the dummy’s freshly
promoted three baby Clubs. Here were the hands after winning two
rounds of Clubs, proceeding with the Club Queen and pitching
declarer’s Heart 2 (notice the dummy’s only loser is the Spade
Queen):
So, is it always right not to pull the last trump? No, not
when the opponents’ could disrupt entries to a long running suit
without entries. This hand is similar to the last, but notice
how the dummy lacks outside entries:
Again, we are in our favorite contract, 6 Spades.
Fortunately, West leads the Heart Queen to our Ace. We play
Heart Ace, all follow. On the Heart King, we again find the
opponents’ are 3-1 and will eventually win the Spade Queen. But
this time we cannot use our friend, the Rule of 1. If we cash
the Club Ace and begin playing dummy Clubs, when the opponents’
ruff with the outstanding Spade Queen, it is all over. No more
entries, no more pitches, no more promotion – how sad.
Instead,
if we draw the last trump, the opponents’ can do no harm. We
have controls in all the suits and can now run the dummy’s
beautiful Clubs! Thank goodness West didn’t make an opening
lead of a Diamond or our Rule of 1 story would fizzle! The point
is, when the promotion race is on, it helps to be one step ahead
– often the name of the game is control of the outside suits.
7 6
5 4
4 
K 8 7 6 
K 5 4 3