In Bridge, declarer play is always the focus of everyone interested in the outcome of a particular deal, which could make a big difference in the final outcome, particularly if the battle is between two teams in the international field representing different countries. Today's illustration is one such deal played in a European Championship where Austria won against Poland.
These were the north south hands:
North surprising opened the bidding with ID and south became the declarer in 4H. The opening lead was KC. Take it from there. How would your tackle 4H?
Looking at the hands, you have a club loser and two spade losers. So it seems unless the hearts break 3-3, the contract would be difficult to make.
Well let me give you the east - west hands too. Obviously the hearts are 4-1 with east - west holding the following hands:
Well, what do you do to the first trick? Do you duck a club or go up with the ace? Ducking has an advantage, first to establish communication and secondly if the defence tries for a trump promotion by playing spades, that would be more difficult for the defence to find through a duck rather than by taking the first trick with the ace of clubs.
Any way what is your plan to avoid the trump loser to enable you to make the contract? The slender hope of course lies in getting dummy's spades good enough to apply pressure on east who holds the trump control.
After ducking the first club, when west switched to trumps declarer played a spade from the dummy east winning and returning a club won by AC. When declarer played a second spade, east won again and played back the third club. Declarer ruffed it, cashed a round of trumps and entered dummy via a diamond to produce this end position:
When declarer now ruffed a spade and entered dummy with the KD, he held east by the horns, when he now led his winning spade - a coup de grace indeed. For what could east do? If he ruffed, an overruff would give declarer the rest, whereas if he discarded, which he did at the table, declarer would discard his last diamond with the lead still remaining in the dummy to apply the same pressure on east - a brilliantly executed trump coup by the declarer.
So in Bridge when nothing seems to work, the end position squeeze is worked out by the sheer timing of the play in the proper sequence. But let me put the final question to my readers? Do you see a way out for the defence to escape this end position?
Well, you see dummy essentially needed three entries, one, to ruff a club (necessary in order to shorten his trumps for the ending), one to ruff a spade and the last to play the winning spades, whereas there were only two available given the diamond split. East donated the extra entry by playing a club at trick 6, instead of a diamond, which would have made the declarer short of an entry to dummy. What if declarer had ruffed a club earlier himself. Then the defence could counter by playing the 4th club to extract declarer's trump prematurely before the spades could be established.
Declarer played well no doubt taking the only chance. But that chance lay also with the defence who were merciful. In that way Bridge is a magnanimous game.

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North     South
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J9754        86
K       AQ10976
AKQ6        952
A62         J10
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North     West     East     South
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  J97       Q       10          -
  ---       -       J5       Q109
   AK     1074       J         95
  ---        9       8          -
=================================

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 West      East
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  Q32      AK10
   83      A542
10743        J8
KQ94       8753
===============