11 Unblocking

Blocking the suit is one of learners’ most frequent errors. Here is declarer playing a heavenly gift: a good suit with all or most of the top honours split between hand and dummy, most of the cards in hand. A typical example would be Hand:  AJ10xx.   Dummy: KQx – five sure tricks staring us in the face, surely?  Not if you block the suit. Play ace from hand first “because it’s the top card” and you’ll only make three tricks unless you can clean up later. The rule is: Play first the high honour(s) from the short suit.  Here that means K, Q, A, J, 10  Hooray!  I do hope you had that one under your belt years ago.

Next, you are defending and your partner leads a king to you. You have Ax in that suit and if you play small, you had better go to confession tonight. Of course you play A on the K and lead the small card back to your partner’s Queen. It’s “high honour from the short suit first”, isn’t it?

It’s all part of a general principle to avoid blockage in varied situations: if small cards outnumber the high cards, you can afford to play low to start with, but when high cards predominate, get them going first. And when you have only two cards, here comes a vital no-brainer: most of the time the high card comes first, and in one specific situation you play high first no matter what the cards are:

When you are leading from a doubleton, always play the higher card first, no matter what the cards are: A9, J3, 7,6 ….  I once ticked my partner off for leading a 2 from 32. “What does it matter?” he objected. “You’re giving me the wrong count of the hand”,  I replied, “I thought your 2 must be a singleton.” 

When a suit gets blocked, there may be a blockhead somewhere.