Winning Extra Tricks

Hi everyone, on this hand we get to practice our declarer play in no trumps. And we start with an opening bid of 2NT showing a strong balanced hand. North bids 6NT. Wahoo! That's plenty high enough.

Diamond opening lead, so a quick count of our tricks.

We've got ace, king, queen of spades. That's three spade tricks. Three heart tricks. Three diamond tricks is nine. And we can turn to the club suit to get our extra tricks.

There's two things going on on the club suit. The first is that we have eight clubs between the two hands. So the opposition only have five. If we just keep playing clubs then the opposition are going to run out of clubs before we do, probably. So we're certainly going to attack the club suit for that reason.

The second thing is that we can take a club finesse. So we have to hope West over there has the king of clubs. Notice it doesn't do West any good to play the king. Because if he did that we would just pop the ace on it.

Of course we don't know that West has got the king, but we hope!

When the club finesse works we need to repeat that process by playing a club towards the queen. So we cross back to the south hand with anything. A Spade, heart or diamond and take another finesse.

If everyone follows suit that'll be eight clubs gone. We played two rounds of clubs. Four clubs went each time. We have four remaining. So there's only one club left.

When we play the ace of clubs, that's the last of East and West's clubs. So out of five of clubs becomes a winner. We make all 13 tricks.