Eszter and I combined well on this hand to defeat a 3NT that was made at every other table that played that contract:
NS Game, Dealer NorthEast opens 1
and West bids 3NT. Everyone passes and Partner leads (predictably) the
Jack
You are South, and can see the following:
Jack led by North East (Dummy) 
J864
QJ4
KQ1074
K
South A9532
10976
A963
-
The King wins trick 1 in Dummy (You discard the
3) and Declarer leads a small Diamond. How do you assess the hand?
Clearly someone has a boatload of Clubs on this hand, probably both West
and North. Aside from that there's not much you can say at this stage of the hand, but on general principles I played low on this trick. Declarer won the Jack (Partner follows with the 2) and switched to the
Queen, on which Partner discards the
8. How do you play?
Now we can assess the hand more fully: Partner is showing a Heart trick with the
8. Clearly West has 4 Spades, probably 5 or 6 Clubs, but bid 3NT, so probably only 2 Hearts (Kx or Ax) which makes the
Jack a singleton. Does that suggest anything? Well it did to me, because Eszter's lead of a Club at trick one and my duck at trick 2 have killed Dummy stone dead. I can always prevent Declarer from reaching Dummy to establish or enjoy the Diamonds there., so I ducked the
Queen, ducked the
10 which followed it, but took the 3rd Spade when Declarer led a small Spade to Dummy's Jack.
I now switched to the
9, on which Declarer played low. Eszter popped up with the Ace and led a Diamond to my Ace. When I switched back to Spades, Declarer was well and truly trapped in his hand, winning with the King, and Eszter discarded a Heart. Declarer cashed the
King and the AQ of Clubs but then had to give a trick to Eszter's 10. On that penultimate trick Dummy has to discard either their last Heart or their last Diamond. Declarer chose wrong and threw away the
King, and my
9 took the last trick for -2.
This would have been a better result except that lots of EW Pairs were in 4
, going off because of the 5-0 split. 5 Pairs, however, were making 3NT, several with an overtrick, so this was a great result and a triumph for defensive counting by both of us.
