This is aHand:

Bidding.

North is dealer on this deal and has 12 points, suggesting he has sufficient to open the bidding, but it's the weirdest 12 points we have seen in a long time. All the high cards are concentrated in the short suits, and the long suits (Clubs and Spades) are bereft of playing strength.

Partner might open 1♣ on that but what would be the point? Rather sensibly he Passes. That allows us to open 1NT in third seat with 15 points and a 5·3·3·2 pattern.

North now raises us to 3NT (what else could he bid?) and that naturally ends the auction.

Play.

The opening lead of the ♣K promises to be the top of a sequence. In this case it's a near sequence (we lead the top card from suits such as ♣K Q 10 or ♣Q J 9).

When the dummy is exposed we must count our top tricks.  We can see three Hearts, five Diamonds and one Club giving us nine tricks off the top. That means we can cream our nine winners immediately and let the dogs fight over the rest.

Can we fail? Oh yes! Let's look at our Diamond suit. We, after playing off our ♦A K, have three winners waiting in our hand. But... it's all about entries.

Take a good look at our hand (the closed hand). We only have one entry... Our ♥A.

Success in a hand often rests in the ability to get back and forth. Hearts is our transportation suit, the one that allows us to get back to the closed hand.

That means the order in which we play the tricks is crucial. We take the ♣A at trick one (noting the startling 6-0 Club split) and then (and this is critical) we must strip the dummy of its ♦A K at tricks two and three.

We'd like to continue with Diamonds but we can't – the suit is blocked. At trick four, we have to turn to Hearts by cashing the ♥K. When we continue with the ♥Q we must overtake this with our ♥A in order to place the lead in the right hand at the right time. If we fail to do this (if the ♥Q were allowed to win) then the lead would be on table with only feeble black cards to lead. East-West would gain the lead and then would feast on winners – lots of ‘em.

Now the lead is in the closed hand we are in position to play our three good Diamond winners, dumping the useless Clubs as we do so. Then we cash the ♥J as the coup de grâce. Graciously we concede the last four tricks to the rapacious opposition.

Success comes from cashing the top Diamonds, then overtaking a winning Heart in dummy in the closed hand. It is our only way "home" to cash the rest of the Diamond winners.