King leads can be so ambiguous and frustrating at times! Some folks lead the Ace to simplify partner's dilemma when holding the Jack or Queen. When your partner leads the King it could be from so many holdings that it is very difficult to signal when holding the Jack, especially if you hold Jack and the Ten.

To solve this problem some experts advocate the lead of the Ace from Ace-King but they simply trade one problem for another. Occasionally they might want to lead the Ace from a long suit or short suit that does not contain the King. Now partner will likely be misinformed and could signal incorrectly. Say that we have agreed to lead Ace from Ace-King holdings, OK? You lead the Ace from a long suit trying to establish the suit. I am holding Queen and two small ones. When I see the Ace I am going to signal with a high card asking you to continue this suit. I might have been interested in some other suit had I been privy to this deviation. So you can quickly see how one method is not much more supreme than the other actually.

Some will argue that they like to know that partner does not have the Ace when the King is led because they can trump it when void. POPPYCOCK! I hope you do not trump my King lead when void! How can I establish a winner in the suit if you trump the King? Granted if one opponent covers my King with the Ace you might very well trump it but if you do not see the Ace don't waste a trump, instead take a pitch of some card that will benefit your hand. What you gain is a ditch of a useless card and set a trick up for me to give you yet another discard in the hand. So what if the opponent takes his Ace, we still gain!

The scope of this article however was not to argue both sides of this age-old battle but to shed some light on some simple things that cost us in our day-to-day games, things we can control like suit continuations. Take this spade holding for example:

I lead the King and it holds the trick. The bidding indicates that the opponents have tricks left and you as well. Once the King holds I continue with the Queen. It holds as well! Our partner has played the 4 and then the 6. Normally you signal high/low to show an even number of cards in a suit but we tend to invert this signal for spades. Partner should be showing us three spades. But then again consider this. Normally we lead King and follow with the Jack to show the Queen in our possession.

My point is this. Partner needs more information about our hand before he signals in spades. It might be right when an honor is led to play low/high holding two cards or three cards. Once the honor is led, and if it is being led from a short suit holding we might not want to play high/low with three. Also we gain valuable info when pard does not skip and honor in playing the spades. Say pard did have KQJ, he can play the King, then Queen, then Jack…..no problem. But suppose he has the hand above. Don't you think he would like to see the Ten or Ace for that matter?

With this in mind we use the break in sequence to show length, more than three trumps! So in our example we play the King and then the Jack to ask partner to unblock with his highest trump! This protects us when we have holdings like KQx in spades. To have your partner play his highest honor, simply skip in the sequence.

Many variations of this exist such as QJ108. The lead of the Queen followed by the lead of the Ten also asks for an unblock of the highest card. If you do not want to see partner's highest card simply play down the line in your sequence.

Some folks advocate leading the Queen when holding KQ10 to ask for a Jack unblock. This makes life easier for a continuation when the Queen holds the trick. You may or may not see a game where someone will take the risk of using the Bath Coup, but holding AJx I will duck an opening lead from my left of the K to induce the opponent into leading it a second time into "Jaws." Leading the Queen (from KQ10x) asking partner to play the Jack if he has it works for me.

Regards,
Ruffkid1 (Jay Tomlinson)