Bridge

Bridge players are taught to keep their powder dry and not to sacrifice their high cards frivolously. But sometimes your aim in throwing away an honor unnecessarily may be to persuade the defenders to keep plugging away at a suit, instead of switching their attention to a more fruitful direction. Consider a full deal where you might have to keep your opponents hopping.

After North’s three-no-trump call, in your methods showing a balanced raise to game in hearts with at least four trumps, you make a somewhat undisciplined leap to six hearts, thereby concealing as much evidence from the opponents as possible in the process — never a bad idea in abstract!

On the spade-jack opening lead, you find your chances of making 12 tricks appear to rest on the trump finesse. Can you improve the odds? Answer: yes, so long as you remember to put up dummy’s spade queen at the first trick, so that when East covers, West does not know if a second spade is cashing. (If you had played low from dummy at the first trick, West would have known your spade ace was bare.)

Now lead a careful club jack to dummy’s ace — so that West has no reason to foresee any discards looming — then run the heart queen. If West works out to shift to a diamond on winning the heart king, give up and go join an easier game!

Bid with the aces

South holds:

Answer: Jump to two spades. You are dead minimum for this action, but your fifth trump, side four-card suit and singleton all add up to just enough to let you take this encouraging but nonforcing call.