§10 is led plan your play

On our hand this week, East Doubles the conventional Stayman bid for a club lead.

If East has both the Clubs and the Diamond Ace we have no chance of making the contract as East’s Double, apart from being lead directing,  is likely to be showing at least a five card suit.

So we have to assume West has the Diamond Ace.

We will therefore need to cut communications between East and West by holding up the first club lead.

If we assume East has five clubs and there are three in Hand and three in dummy we can calculate that West has exactly two and only one round of Clubs has to be ducked.

If we want to speed up the thought processes we can use the “RULE OF SEVEN” - you add dummy’s Clubs and declarer’s Clubs and take it away from Seven and the answer tells you how many times you have to hold up.

Had you held up for an extra round on this hand it would in fact not make much difference and you would still make 10 tricks by way of 2 Spades, 4 Hearts, 3 Diamonds and 1 club.

 You can also view  watch the following movie to see how the hand pans out. (You need bridgvu.exe programme  or BridgeBase programme on your machine already to view it ) and it is available free from   http://www.haroldschogger.com/videos.htm

 alternatively watch the film www.haroldschogger.com/movies2.htm