Jules Renard, a French author who died in 1910, quipped, "Man who waits for roast duck to fly into mouth must wait very, very long time."

There are deals in which the defenders must be active, positively establishing the tricks that they need to defeat the contract. In others, though, it pays to be passive. And there can be various reasons for this. Today's deal features a play that would not occur to many inexperienced players.

Look at the West and North hands. South is in four hearts. West leads his singleton diamond. Declarer wins with dummy's king and plays a trump to his queen. How should West plan the defense?

North's sequence showed five hearts and game values. South, with four hearts, preferred that suit.

At trick one, if East had been sure that West had led a singleton, he would have made a suit-preference play, dropping the seven (the high card asking for the higher-ranking of the other two side-suits). But that was not obvious. So East reasonably played the two, discouraging.

West could "see" four tricks: the heart ace, the club ace, East's winner and a diamond ruff. But which did East have, the spade ace or club king? West did not know. But he could find out. He knew East had only a singleton heart. So West let declarer take the second trick, knowing that when South played another trump, he could win and be guided by East's discard.

Here, East signaled with the spade 10. So West cashed his club ace, shifted to the spade nine, and received a diamond ruff for down one.

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