Not every situation presents an ‘obvious’ opening lead. You may recall the saying that “God didn’t give you AK in the same suit for you to lead any other suit”, as well as the well known rule that you don’t lead an unsupported ace, especially when you hold AQ. There are, however, times when if you think things through, you can come up with what is so unorthodox that it makes so little sense to declarer that it can bring about a quite unexpected result. In the previous chapter we had to come up with an opening lead against 6S. We held AQx of spades. The lead from left field that I suggested was the ace of trumps.

Now for some more opening lead problems

a) Dealer South, EW Vul
The bidding has been:

South	West	North	East
Pass	Pass	1	Pass
1	Pass	2	Pass
Pass	Pass

32

QJ3

AK8

97643

Two more opening leads to look at. These should be easy enough because you don’t need more than two tricks to defeat small slams. But you still need to give the opening leads a lot of thought. Handing declarer a slam on a platter can be somewhat of a bummer, don’t you agree? So give these some thought before we go to Chapter 7.

e) The bidding has been:
Dealer South, Nil Vul

South	West	North	East
1NT	Pass	4	Pass
4	Pass	5	Pass
5NT	Pass	6NT	Pass
Pass	Pass

North’s 4C and 5C are ace and king asks, and South has shown one ace and three kings
Your hand:

AQ2

J973

JT8

743

This is not a double dummy play problem but more about bidding, featuring yet again what seems to be the constant shunning of the minor suit slam. It is true that in this deal, 3NT played by North and making overtricks would have scored over 80% so you might say, why worry about bidding any slams. At match points it is no big deal, but at teams, bidding the good slams can make a huge difference. But let’s see why a very good small slam (which makes an overtrick played double dummmy) was either too difficult to bid, or simply eschewed in favour of the easily bid 3NT.

Board 7 from Thursday 23/05/24
Dealer S All Vul

	QT76 32 AJ2 AT54
J42 T7 QT86543 2		953 QJ985 K7 Q86
	AK8 AK64 9 KJ973

Chapter 2: Which Suit, Which card?
The problems we saw earlier were not that difficult when you thought about them, were they? You had a clear indication of which suit to lead, and, hopefully the logical rules of ‘fourth highest’ or ‘ace when you have AK in your suit’ were good enough to get you off to the best start. There is a good reason why it is important to have a specific system and understanding of what each card led on the opening lead is trying to say, because partner needs to know that. So, let’s now take a look at what all the cards, from the ace down to the humble deuce, should generally mean to any partnership. Then, when the basic understandings are there, we can look at even more sophisticated ways we can use all of the thirteen cards we are dealt, be they aces and kings or little pip cards.

Introduction: Some thoughts

Here are some things you may not know, or even have thought about, when you have begun on your wonderful journey in the game of bridge: