Dealer: North Vuln: N/S

When I first played this hand, I put all my eggs in the finessing basket and like a less experienced player, did not check on all my options. All I have to show for it, is an example hand for hand of the week for my page viewers.

Let's now go back to the drawing board.

Initially, without doing any work at all, you have 2 Spade winners, 3 Heart winners, 2 Diamond winners and 4 club winners so you only have to generate 1 more.

As I said it looks like the extra trick can come from the spade finesse. However without jeopardizing your contract, it cannot hurt to initially play off two rounds of Diamonds and see if anything interesting falls. If nothing interesting falls you can then do the Spade finesse. However on this occasion the Diamond Queen fell in two rounds and now you can play for the 100% successful play of letting them have the Diamond Jack and then claim 12 tricks with your 12th trick coming from the ♦9 in dummy rather then the rather stupid 50% finesse play that wasn't working on this occasion.