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Declarer is South, in 4S doubled. West leads the queen of hearts. How should declarer play to avoidminus 800 and a bottom board?

Board 6 from Tuesday 8/04/2025
Dealer E EW Vul

	82 K632 J6432 T3
Q QJT8 AT97 KJ87		J53 A954 K5 A654
	AKT9764 7 Q8 Q92

Another deal from X-Clubs that produced some extraordinary results. The opening lead would appear to be a given, and so should the outcome, but read on and you’ll be surprised!

Board 17 from X-Clubs 1/04/2025
Dealer N Nil Vul

	JT54 KQJ652 94 T
AKQ8 AT98 K6 Q97		93 43 AQJT8 KJ32
	762 7 7532 A8654

This deal comes from another match point session, where the opening lead can score or lose you many match points, as of course can the declarer play. In this deal only overtricks mattered, and the best lead from a hand that has little of any substance, resulted in a good match point score, in fact over 80% on the board, but it also needed the cooperation of partner.

Board 13. Dealer N All Vul

	76 A952 JT AQ973
K52 KJ87 A65 JT8		J984 T63 432 642
	AQT3 Q4 KQ987 K5

There is no such thing as the correct lead from a particular holding. For instance if you had a suit like KQJ92 would you ever think of leading any other card but the KING? This deal comes from the archives and I reported it about 40 years ago, but bidding has advanced considerably since then and we may bid differently these days. How, I don’t know. But then, so many years ago, we bid as much by instinct and the seat of our pants rather than science. At the time, we bid to a 3NT contract which gave the opponents enough information to defeat the contract, but they failed to listen. Let me tell you the story as I remember it.

Dealer W All Vul

	Q87 53 JT65 K643
AK64 A K874 AJ82		53 T8764 AQ2 Q75
	JT92 KQJ92 93 T9

The Guessing Game
In this series, I hope to teach the reader how to make the best guess when they have to make the opening lead. As part of the exercise I have asked a number of club players to offer their guesses as to a) dummy’s cards and b) their opening lead. This is what I said to them.

“This series will be about opening leads, because they are the one single most important part of defence. They set the scene for the rest of the defence. You will expect to defend half the time, so if you can defend better than others, your overall scores will be much better than others. Don’t forget that it takes TWO people to defend but only ONE is responsible for the opening lead. It is therefore most important that your partner also understands what you are trying to achieve with your opening lead. Wouldn’t it be great if you and your partner, when defending, could see, from the very first card played, what everyone holds? Surprisingly, you CAN! I exaggerate of course, but a good pair of defenders will be able to GUESS with an amazing degree of accuracy, just how they, as a partnership, can best defend right from the very first card played.”

This series will not be aimed at any particular level, but I do hope that the reader will learn the importance of ‘guesswork’.