The Video Transcript:

Strategy after the opening lead.

Let’s look at a possible hand. After the pass, you could even have two hearts. It really doesn’t matter. You don’t have.

You have this heart here that somebody’s always can take it to stop you. Okay, if you have a choice, and I will, I will change one of these club spots just to make life a little bit easier.

Okay, supposing that the deuce of clubs is lead. Okay, and uh, four and three, seven, five. So, okay, and the king comes up, right? Or the jack? Do you want to overtake that? What are you going to do if you overtake it? What is your plan?

You’re never going to want to lead a spade suit like that which was passed to you, by the way. I mean, what are you going to do with this spade? So, you’re going to underlie the king and leave your king unprotected. Um, you don’t want to mess with the diamonds because you don’t know.

You don’t want to lead a high one; the queen could come out. You don’t want to leave a low one and leave yourself without protection. So, you let the opponents do the work for you.

If the ace of club comes up, well, hopefully it’s not going to come up from this side so they can go through this. Maybe it’ll come up from this side and if you conduct that over to this person that’s fine.

A lot of people, a lot of good players will try to make this guy stay on lead. What you want to do is have the opponents leading this hand for you. Okay, however, if we have another spade and not a dangerous spade now you want to take the lead because you have a safe lead.

You have a comfortable ten of spades lead; you don’t have a worry about an ace or king. So when to take the lead? When you can drive spades safely, when you don’t have danger suits in your hand when you don’t want the man on the right to be leading through a bad spade. Otherwise, take the lead if you can drive queen spades quite drive spades safely and you avoid the lead if you have a hand where you don’t want to be leading from dangerous suits.