Dealer: East

Vuln: N/S

To defeat this contract you will need to take 4 defensive tricks.

The knee jerk play at trick 2 is to play a second club and try and give your partner a ruff. If your partner does have the doubleton he will be able to ruff. However you will only have three tricks. From the bidding it looks like partner has nothing at all so even if you give partner a ruff that will only be 3 defensive tricks, not enough to defeat the contract. However if partner has something good in Diamonds, or even trumps (unlikely on the bidding) you might get a Diamond trick. So what is the downside of playing back a second top Club. If you do that and partner doesn't have a doubleton all you have achieved is making two winners in dummy for declarer and declarer has done NO WORK. Therefore, instead of giving partner a possible club ruff why not establish a Spade trick for yourself while you still have club control. With this in mind play back the Spade King at trick 2. Declarer wins and draws 2 rounds of trumps before taking the losing Diamond finesse. Partner comes back a Spade and you now have 4 defensive tricks. 1 Spade, 1 Diamond and 2 clubs. If you merely play back a second club at trick 2 declarer will be able to dump the Spade loser on third round of clubs and make his contract.

You can also play out the following hand  to see how the hand pans out.    (You need bridgvu.exe programme  and it is available free from   http://www.haroldschogger.com/movies.html )