Rusinow Leads

I learned to play bridge in a very organic manner in University. If someone had a new convention they wanted to try out they just had to give a brief explanation of what the bids meant and then we were 'playing' it going forward. It'd come up every now and then and we'd bungle our way through it, but since my days were spent entirely sleeping, eating, playing bridge, and *cough* going to class it would come up often enough that I'd get a rough enough idea of what the convention actually was and maybe even why we were using it. (Yesterday's hand featured Jacoby 2NT where I didn't remember what the responses meant. Likely this is because I didn't actually go over the responses when I learned it in the first place and they just kinda got tacked on at some point in the future.)

That worked fine at the time since I played an awful lot and I played with a very inbred group of people. It didn't matter if we weren't using the 'right' responses to Jacoby 2NT as long as we were using what each other was using. Unfortunately I now play about 4 hands a week, all with Captain Jack. Captain Jack is good at berating me in polite fashion (Jack wonders what you were thinking... Jack didn't consider that bid...) but very bad at explaining why he does things, at explaining why he wants me to do things, and even explaining what he wants me to do. This means I'm not getting enough hands in to learn organically why to do something and not something else, and the lack of real dialog with my partner restricts that even more. I feel like my declarer play is getting a bit of a workout playing with Jack but bidding and defense are falling away.

Now, a couple weekends ago I played a couple hours of bridge with Bungo, Adam, and Aidan. Near the end of the game Aidan mentioned wanting to change our lead system to something called 'Rusinow Leads'. He gave a brief rundown and we decided to play them, but then it never actually came up before we stopped playing. There's no way I can get Jack to teach them to me, and I likely won't play with Aidan again for months, so how am I to learn this awesome way of leading?

I turned to the source of all knowledge, Wikipedia. Sadly, the Wikipedia article is about as good at teaching things as Jack is. It defines what the term means, gives a single brief example of one upside to the system, and that's it. No discussion of potential downsides. No explanation of why that one upside matters. No exceptions for when you may not want to use it.

Since I'm not in a position to learn organically (I don't play enough) and if I'm going to use something in events I need to actually know it (playing with/against a larger pool of people than in the Comfy) I decided to dig deeper. I went to the Googler and visited a couple dozen different websites that went into Rusinow Leads in various levels of depth. Many were strict copy/pastes of the Wikipedia article (which itself may well have been a copy/paste of one of those websites in the first place), but I was able to piece together enough from the rest to work out what is going on.


The basic idea is you change your opening leads against suit contracts when you're leading a suit your partner did NOT bid so that instead of leading the highest of touching honours you lead the second highest. Why do you want to do this? The theory behind it is that some contracts require the defense to play optimally right from the get-go. If you want to set them you have to do the exact right thing, so you want to convey the right information to your partner immediately so he doesn't make a 'mistake' and let declarer make. You can't give him perfect information, of course, but the idea behind Rusinow leads is you can give him clearer relevant information immediately than standard leads. Rusinow leads have their own ambiguities, of course, but the idea here is that those ambiguities are less likely to be immediately relevant.

Right now the 'standard' lead is K from KQ, Q from QJ, J from JT, and either A or K from AK. Which one depends on the partnership (I've always led A from AK with Andrew and Sky) but both have their problems. For example, if you lead K from AK and your partner is on lead and leads a K and you hold JT2 in that suit, what do you do? Assuming declarer ducks the trick in any situation, what do you want to have happen?

Well, if partner has KQxx then you want him to continue the suit. Knock out declarer's A and your side gets a second trick the next time you're in. If partner has AKxx then you need him to stop playing the suit, as he will set up declarer's Q if he plays it again. You need to get in with another suit and fire your J through declarer's Q and you'll take 3 tricks in the suit. If he has KQ you want to signal encouragingly. If he has AK you want to signal discouragingly. Short of x-ray vision, however, there's no way to know which way you need to signal. The ambiguity between AK and KQ comes up straight away and if the deal hinges on this one decision you have no way to get it right.

As another example, assume your partner is on lead and leads an A and you lead A from AK. You hold the Q. Do you want partner to keep playing this suit or not? If you need an entry to your hand to lead another suit immediately is the Q an entry? If he actually has AK then it certainly is. If he has Axx then it isn't. Should you encourage with the Q or not? If he actually has AK and you discourage then he'll likely shift to another suit possibly letting declarer deal with the obvious losers in that suit elsewhere. If he has Axx and you encourage, should he continue? You might have the K, after all. But maybe you're encouraging from the Q and he should attack some other suit. It's hard for either partner to know what to do here, and that opens up potential errors.

I actually shy away from leading Axx a lot of the time just because of this issue, and I can definitely remember losing some boards playing with Andrew when I had Axx and he had Kxxx and we just didn't take our two tricks and eventually they pitched their losers away.


What's the solution? Well, with Rusinow leads you always lead the second lowest honour from a sequence of touching honours. So you always lead K from AK, but you also lead Q from KQ, J from QJ, T from JT, and 9 from T9. We're shifting the ambiguity down the line. (Is the 9 from T9x or 9x?) Think about it though, would you rather be unsure about where the T is or where the K or Q is? Especially in a critical situation where you need to know something right now... Is it the T? Really?

How would Rusinow leads help in the previous example? Well, you hold JTx and your partner is on lead. If he leads an A then you know he doesn't have the K and this suit is a wash. Unless he somehow also has the Q I guess, but that's a pretty zany lead and he'll probably continue it anyway. You're going to discourage at any rate, since the card partner cares about has to be the K. If he leads a K then he also has the A and may or may not have the Q. You want to discourage because if declarer has the Q you want to get in with another suit and fire your J through. (As an aside, if partner did have AKQ the right way to lead is to start with the K and then continue the Q since you should play 2nd highest then lowest of your honour sequence.) If partner leads the Q then he has the K and you want to encourage since you have the suit locked up except for the A. Note that you know partner doesn't have the A since he has to have the K and Q and didn't lead the K.

In the case where you have the Q and partner leads the A you have no ambiguity anymore. Discourage since this suit is going nowhere fast.


How could they hurt? Well, you can no longer lead the Q from Qxx without pranking your partner, since you should have the K to make that lead. But why exactly are you leading the Q from Qxx again? Note that the only real time you'd want to make such a lead is when partner bid that suit which is why Rusinow leads are off when you're leading partner's suit. Showing him which specific honour you have and setting up an immediate finesse against dummy are powerful advantages and you don't want to muddy those waters.

They also hurt when you lead a 9. What do you have? T987? T92? 92? I think this is a small price to pay, really, but only trial and error will tell for sure.


The last part of Rusinow leads is they're only on for the opening lead against a suit contract. The reasoning here is pinpointing high cards in the suit led tends to be the critical factor in a suit contract (you don't want to establish a pitch for declarer and your length tricks will just get ruffed) while the critical factor in no trump tends to be establishing the long cards and ensuring an entry to the established cards. What are you leading from KQxx or KQxxx? Not the K or the Q!

Standard leads still have a lot of the same flaws in no trump though, so people who play Rusinow leads in suit contracts often play another system for no trump contracts. One such system is called Journalist leads and I'll detail those at a later date.

And why only on opening lead? Well, for the same reason they're not on when leading your partner's bid suit, really. Mid hand you sometimes want to shift to an honour that isn't part of a sequence and your partner will get hurt more when he expects you to have the higher touching honour then.