Choose a lead

[Siegmund]

Matchpoints, favorable.

 

Your hand: ♠8x ♥Q6xx ♦A9xx ♣T8x.

 

EDITED auction: LHO deals and passes, partner passes, and RHO opens:

(The first few responses were posted with an "RHO deals and opens 1H" incorrect auction)

 

Pass-pass-1♥-pass

-2♥-X-pass-3♦

-pass-pass-3♥-all pass

 

What is your lead? How obvious do you think it is?

[JLOGIC]

I AM A PSYCHOPATH BUT MIKEH IS GIVING ME THE HELP I NEED

[655321]

♠8 seems sufficiently obvious/normal to me that I am curious as to why this is given as a lead problem.

[Siegmund]

The early voters seem to like the spade. The spade does seem obvious, in a way, but at the same time, seemed bad to me.

 

Partner almost surely has only 4 spades - with 5 he'd more likely overcall 2S than double - leaving the opponents 7 to our 6, and me with no spots. With Jx/Tx I might well lead a spade anyway; but with 8x decided I would be finessing my partner out of a spade, perhaps out of one more spade than declarer could finesse him out of without my help, and little chance of setting up two spade winners for our side.

 

At the table I wound up leading an unhappy DA but only after agonizing over a club instead. The only comfort was seeing the SQJT appear in dummy (partner had the ace, but declarer had Kxxx for the other 3 spade tricks.) If I had it to do over again I think I would try the club not the diamond. But I think we (I include myself, on many previous occasions) lead the spade automatically more often than we should.

[Fluffy]

I think you have it the wrong way, if you fiense partner, you are giving away nothing the opponents didn't know/suspect. If you lead from Jx you are bloqing a trick very often.

[mikeh]

The early voters seem to like the spade. The spade does seem obvious, in a way, but at the same time, seemed bad to me.

 

Partner almost surely has only 4 spades - with 5 he'd more likely overcall 2S than double - leaving the opponents 7 to our 6, and me with no spots. With Jx/Tx I might well lead a spade anyway; but with 8x decided I would be finessing my partner out of a spade, perhaps out of one more spade than declarer could finesse him out of without my help, and little chance of setting up two spade winners for our side.

 

At the table I wound up leading an unhappy DA but only after agonizing over a club instead. The only comfort was seeing the SQJT appear in dummy (partner had the ace, but declarer had Kxxx for the other 3 spade tricks.) If I had it to do over again I think I would try the club not the diamond. But I think we (I include myself, on many previous occasions) lead the spade automatically more often than we should.

partner ducks the 1st spade since he knows declarer can't hold 5. With our trump holding, don't we get a ruff anyway? A trick we can't get otherwise?

[bluecalm]

My first thought would be that something is strange as partner has not opened the bidding and we have 6count which leaves 24+ for them and they are bidding that soft.

 

Anyway I lead spade and consider it automatic choice. I hope to one day see some ground breaking analysis which makes me reconsider those obvious situations.

I think ruff may be important despite us having 4 trumps.

[Siegmund]

Doesn't anybody think it's important that we KNOW spades is the declaring side's best side suit? (They should have 8 or 9 hearts; 7 spades; only 5 or 6 of each minor.) The more I think about it the more I think spades is the worst of the 4 suits to lead.

 

partner ducks the 1st spade since he knows declarer can't hold 5. With our trump holding, don't we get a ruff anyway?

 

If declarer has both HA and HK, yes. But if dummy has a high heart, and partner's singleton is small, declarer pulls all the trumps without loss when he takes the percentage play.

 

A trick we can't get otherwise?

 

We can get that trick by forcing declarer in diamonds, too. (And if the trump position is the feared Axx opposite KJTxx or similar, we can ONLY get our tricks by forcing him in diamonds while we still have a spade stopper.) That was why I led the DA at the table -- the old adage about "if you have 4 trumps, lead your side's longest suit to force declarer".

It turned out, on this particular deal, to be necessary. I posted the hand to get a feel for whether it was a good idea in the long run or not. I get the feeling so far that its a possibility nobody ever thinks about, and I am not sure if that is because a spade is so good, or just because we all had a blind spot.

[mikeh]

Doesn't anybody think it's important that we KNOW spades is the declaring side's best side suit? (They should have 8 or 9 hearts; 7 spades; only 5 or 6 of each minor.) The more I think about it the more I think spades is the worst of the 4 suits to lead.

 

partner ducks the 1st spade since he knows declarer can't hold 5. With our trump holding, don't we get a ruff anyway?

 

If declarer has both HA and HK, yes. But if dummy has a high heart, and partner's singleton is small, declarer pulls all the trumps without loss when he takes the percentage play.

 

A trick we can't get otherwise?

 

We can get that trick by forcing declarer in diamonds, too. (And if the trump position is the feared Axx opposite KJTxx or similar, we can ONLY get our tricks by forcing him in diamonds while we still have a spade stopper.) That was why I led the DA at the table -- the old adage about "if you have 4 trumps, lead your side's longest suit to force declarer".

It turned out, on this particular deal, to be necessary. I posted the hand to get a feel for whether it was a good idea in the long run or not. I get the feeling so far that its a possibility nobody ever thinks about, and I am not sure if that is because a spade is so good, or just because we all had a blind spot.

I doubt, very much, that the experts who posted had a blind spot...I know I didn't and I'd bet long odds that Justin, for one, didn't either.

 

Bridge is a game of percentages. My experience, yours will differ, suggests that the diamond Ace lead has a higher likelihood of blowing a trick/tempo than does the spade lead. Had it been LHO who competed to 3♥, I'd be more inclined to not lead a spade...there being a higher likelihood that LHO had a high heart, as one reason.

 

And for all that spades is their 7 card fit, partner suggested bidding spades, so maybe he has AJ10x over dummy's Qxx/Kxx or maybe he has KQ109 over dummy's Jxx etc.....we can construct all kinds of layouts good and bad for any lead....we go with what our reading, discussions, and experience tell us is the best play...knowing that on any given hand, it may be horribly 'wrong'.

[bluecalm]

I for sure didn't have a blind spot I even managed to construct some simulation (which admittedly wasn't too precise because bidding is complicated).

The spade is better than club because you often need a spade ruff and you rarely will get forcing defense going by leading club anyway (that being said I belive club can't be much worse than spade which my very imprecise sim seems to confirm).

Red suit leads are obviously very bad, you don't need much experience to know it I think.

[Siegmund]

I did a sim myself this afternoon, and it confirmed the conventional wisdom of S > C > D > H (based on how many tricks worse "this opening lead followed by double-dummy defense is" compared to double-dummy from the start.) I do plan to look at a few typical layouts. Apparently I just got lucky, anticipating an antipercentage lie of the cards that turned out to actually work the time I did it. Good lesson for my mind as to how fixating on just a few situations can skew our perception of the overall percentages.

[Pict]

Who knows the answers, but the votes are clear.