Someone recently posted something about leads and lead conventions. This prompted some thought and I quickly started thinking about leads holding three rags, grunts, pips, spot cards, non-picture cards and preferably not even the ten spot!

Leading from Three Small Cards

With three small cards, some players would lead the top card to inform partner that the suit was weak, allowing partner to make a gameplan change if needed. This might be wonderful news but what will we do when we hold two small? Exactly the same thing? Yes! Now partner is confused and always wondering if you led from a doubleton holding or three-small!

The next group of players advocates leading a small card from 3 rags, grunts, spots, lol....you get the drift. This works fine because now partner is never confused about count. However, partner now has a new problem -- deciding if you led from a suit that contained any honor card in it! We gain on our count but we lose on the strength showing ability of the lead.

What must we do then? Can we have our cake and eat it too? Some folks think so! They are the MUD guys!

MUD. What is it good for! Sounds like that old song WAR, what is it good for, absolutely nuttin lol!

Middle-Up-Down

MUD is an acronym for Middle-Up-Down. These guys lead the middle card and follow it with the higher one at the next opportunity.

The disadvantage is that it can look like shortage...so it is very much like leading top of nothing with three-small but it can also look like small from an honor card as well. I think it certainly has its place however and I employ it!

Why? It has the advantage of allowing the opening leader to follow up with a higher or lower card thus retaining an option....

So-ooooo........falsecarding man, falsecarding!

So....what are we to make of all this info?

Use 'em all I think! On hands that you need to be straight with pard then use your normal lead convention whether it be top or bottom from three-small. Use this when it is important to fool an opponent and irrelevant whether partner gets fooled. Sometimes you can induce an opponent into not trumping by following with the lowest card on the second play. The opponent may think after seeing you high-low that you are out of some suit, or the opponent may trump excessively high, squandering a good trump.

Variable MUD Leads

With three small cards we have six possible ways to play them! With my advanced partners I use these six ways to show strength in the other suits! How? First we rank the suits in standard fashion:

Whether you use a lead convention of highest from three-small or lowest from three-small you can still employ a suit preference type format on your leads if you like!

Let's say that you have the 6 4 2 and you are leading. Obviously the six different combinations are:

The normal progressions are lowest from three-small and some then play the top card next and some play the low one..

I tend to play the top one after leading the lowest. I do this because of something called present count. If I have led from some three-card suit i will have two small cards left to play at my next opportunity. With a doubleton we normally lead the top card.

Top-of-nothing leaders start with the top card.....then they play the next highest card on the next opportunity to play concealing the lowest card.

When you see these two cards come out of your pard's hand many more times than not you can note that a small card is missing after two rounds of play and ask yourself who has it and why hasn't it been played. Once you ask that question you can usually deduce that pard is holding it unless you have some crafty opponents that like to falsecard!

Ok, so back to the MUD concept! What if we totally forgot about MUD and the normal implications and decided that we were going to keep our leads normal but when we had some three-card suit we were contemplating leading but held something like AQ10 in another suit and dying to have pard lead through the high bidder at the table in this suit we might have an option.

Consider this holding:
A Q 10
6 4 2

I have left the rest of the hand out because it is irrelevant. Say the opponent to your right has bid 6 and his pard bid 1.

A low club lead is very passive and normal considering the strength is on your right.

Our lead convention involves leading small from three-small so we deviate. This time we lead the 4. When we lead the middle card first I am advocating this message: the middle card is simply a waiting card. This leaves an option to play a higher card. If we led middle and then played small it would simply look like a doubleton lead.

So now let's take the three normal-looking leads out.

We remove the 2,4,6 because we normally play the 2 first followed by the 6!

Now let's remove the 6, 2, 4 because we lead the 6 and then follow it with the 4!

On for the MUD leads! Let's take the 4,2,6 out because that is not middle-up-down at all!

This leaves us with those three options as abnormal considerations while keeping the others intact as normal lead conventions.

Looking now at the three abnormal cases it becomes easy to assign a meaning to each case!

If we want the lowest-ranking suit led or the remaining two non-spade suits we use the 2,4,6.

That's easy enough because we start with our lowest card in the suit for lowest suit!

If we want the higher of the remaining non-spade suits led we play the 6,2,4. That too is easy because we start with our highest card.

Now for the kicker: If we want a trump, or we want to indicate to partner that our strength is in spades we start with the middle and then the lowest. Granted this fools partner into believing you have a doubleton and should only be used in extreme cases but it is still no worse off than those that employ top-of-nothing leads from three-small.

All things considered, a neat little lead convention!

In the case/example above our strength is in hearts and we are dying to have pard lead them so we can finesse right-hand opponent. So we start with the 6....then we follow that with the 2 on our next opportunity to play in this suit!

Note that you can manipulate these conventions to suit your own methods!

You can call these anything you like if you decide to use them but I call them "Tomlinson" leads.

Weird Science? Maybe lol!

Regards,
Ruffkid1 (Jay Tomlinson)