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lamford, on 2019-July-20, 09:04, said:
If this line works, then the expert defender would have played a diamond at trick two, and then ducked the ten of spades with Jxxx.
A strange comment.
First of all my line works against the given layout by you, diamond switch or not.
Of course if a diamond switch would have been forthcoming at trick 2, I would not have pursued this line any more since dummies entry is gone and there is no point in taking the spade finesse then, whether that finesse works or not.
While it is always a good idea to think about the options good defenders have available to them and what you can deduce about the one they have chosen, I very much doubt that even expert defenders can so easily reconstruct at trick 2 the actual layout of the hidden cards and even if they could that they would be able to predict my suggested line of declarer play.
Expert defenders are not almighty.
If expert defenders would always find the right defense against the actual layout at the table, I would have given up this game long ago.
In fact part of the pleasure is to induce errors by the defense and vice versa.
Of course never assume your opponents to be stupid.
But the most successful declarers are not the ones who pretend their opponents to be infallible, rather the art of taking advantage of their errors.
Even good defenders make plenty of them.
Rainer Herrmann