This is aHand:

Here you have a similar choice to that of Hand 1.

Should you take the same road as before?

Bidding.

We open 1NT after East Passes as dealer and partner responds 2♦. This is a transfer to Hearts, showing five cards in the transfer suit.

Quite why North wishes to do this is not clear at the moment but we do as we are told and bid 2♥. On the next round North jumps to 3NT, offering us a choice of contracts – we could Pass or we could convert to 4♥.

Here, with three-card Heart support and a side-suit shortage in Diamonds, we convert to 4♥.

Play.

North has exactly what he promised – in fact, he has a hand eerily similar to that of the previous deal. Weird, that…

As we are in a suit contract we should count winners and losers. If we look first at losers we see that there are no Spade losers, two Heart losers and a Club loser. The two Diamond losers in hand are covered by dummy’s ♦A K. That’s three losers – so we should just draw trumps, right?

Not so fast! We need to check our winners first. There are three Spades, three Hearts, two Diamonds and a Clubs – only nine. Somehow this doesn’t quite add up…

Now, one of the effects of transfer bids is that we play the hand “the wrong way up�. Extra tricks often come from ruffing losers in dummy – but that is usually where the short trumps are. Here we can make an extra trick by ruffing a Diamond in hand, where we have the three-card Heart holding.

This play swells our winners by one – we are aiming to make three Spades, four Hearts (three on table plus a ruff in hand), two Diamonds and one Club. Were we to draw trumps prematurely we’d end up losing a Diamond at the end.

So we take the ♠Q at trick one and immediately play off three rounds of Diamonds, ruffing the third. It may seem unnatural to take a ruff early in the closed hand but, remember, we are trumping in the short trump hand.

Having secured an extra trump trick we now set about drawing trumps and lead the ♥Q. West takes that and plays another Spade. We win and play another trump.

There is a nasty moment when East takes the ♥K to play yet another Spade (is West going to ruff this?) but all is well and the contract makes for the loss of the ♥A K and a Club.