Take Good Care of your Honors


K Q 9
K J 8 6 2
A 9 7
8 3
10 7 6 5 ------
9 3 Q 10 7 5 4
8 6 5 3 2 K J 10
J 10 K Q 5 4 2
A J 8 4 3 2
A
Q 4
A 9 7 6 Opening lead: 3 of diamonds

When I first looked at this hand, I figured it should make. If you get a diamond lead, you go up, come to the ace of hearts, back to a high trump and throw the queen of diamonds on the king of hearts, cash the ace of clubs, lose a club and . . . and . . . then I looked at the opps' holding and saw the 4-0 split. No, this hand is impossible. West can get in on the second round of clubs and lead a trump, and there just won't be enough trump left to ruff the last round of clubs.
Or won't there be? Well, one overly friendly defender saw to it that declarer didn't need any ruffs.
Opening lead a diamond, declarer going up and discarding a diamond by trick 4 as outlined above, then came a low club. East split his honors, declarer won, picking up another honor from West, then led a low club. West played the jack and was probably salivating over a trump lead when his partner overtook!
He led a heart through declarer's hand, but declarer ruffed with the jack, led to the 9 and queen of spades, back on a diamond ruff, the last trump drawn with the ace, and now his clubs are high! His 9 and 7 of clubs won the last two tricks!
East was just flagrantly wasteful with his club honors. He had the wrong person who could benefit from a ruff. Should he have known? Well, sure. The 10 of clubs went on the first round of the suit. So why is West playing such a high card (and then the jack) if he has another to spare? And if he had no more clubs, then declarer must have started with four, three being very little, at least in comparison to the king, though not so little in comparison to the 5 and 4.
So if declarer has to ruff out two clubs and West has a trump, which East certainly presupposed in going for a heart ruff (and declarer would have had to start with 9 trump if West doesn't have another spade, which would mean the hand was all over), then clearly the best thing the defense can do is let West hold the trick and lead a trump. Presto. Declarer now has one trump in dummy and two small clubs, and you can just sit back and wait for your king to take the setting trick.
Actually, West doesn't even have to lead a trump! If declarer ruffs two clubs, he'll be ruffing with the 9 and then the queen, and West will be able to win the fourth round of trump with his 10. So the tricks were there for the defense. It's declarer who has to worry about getting sufficient tricks, not the defense. The upshot was that declarer won the third round of clubs with the 9, though the defense started with the K, the Q, the J and the 10, the first two guarded 3 times. Now that's profligacy.

Your honors, your top cards are the backbone of all but a very few very distributional hands, and you must treat them with respect for best results. True, you'll sometimes want to overtake a partner's honor, which isn't so terribly difficult to spot when it would be advantageous, and sometimes you'll want to jettison a high honor to avoid being thrown in, in essence giving up one trick to get two, though you've gotta be pretty good to spot when that would be to your advantage.
But without a positive reason to play an honor "unnecessarily" on a trick, I would say you'll want to guard your honors with care and use them to best the other guys, not your partner. There are two pages I have for time some toyed with developing. One would be devoted to this topic of caring for your honors, with examples of how wasting them proved costly. The other would be entitled "Profligacy and Parsimony", devoted to both the times people are wasteful and the times they stingily hang onto their high cards too long. Some one of these days . . .