Techniques for Playing Opening Leads in Spades

"Then, you look at a suit like this. It doesn't look like very much, but you're on lead and there's a twelve bid on the table. So you have two cards and only two cards in this off suit. The idea is to lead the high card first, and even if your suit gets taken, now the high card is only a five here but if it's a five and a three and that's all you have. It really doesn't matter you could have the eight and the five. When you play the high card first and the next time you play the suit you play the low card. You're telling your partner you had two and exactly two. Where as if you had three you would play the bottom card, the middle card, then the upper card. So by playing what's called a high low then you tell your partner you're trumping the third round. This is a suit you don't want to lead. You don't want to lead the ace because you give it up to the king, whoever has the king just gets a free king the next time around. You don't want to lead the queen because, that also surrenders to the king. This is a suit that you leave alone because, you hope that maybe this guy will lead this card and it will come all the way around to you and you're going to get two tricks no matter what happens, unless the suit is being trumped. So this is a suit that you definitely avoid leading from. If you have the ace and a small one. I don't like leading aces. The reason I don't like leading aces, is that the higher the bid is, then what are aces going to draw? If you lead the ace of hearts in this instance, say you had three hearts, you lead the ace of hearts, what's it going to catch? Well, somebody is going to play the four and somebody is going to play the five, and somebody is going to play the six or the seven, it's going to get air. Maybe when they made cards, aces were designed to get kings. I don't know, you always feel better when your ace gets a king. So what you want to do is avoid leading a suit like this, but if you only have two and you're looking to maybe manufacture some trumping power in your hand. You lead the ace it goes through, then you lead the deuce, that's the same as the high, low. You're telling your partner, if you've got the king you can return the suit to me and you can do it in complete comfort. So, when you're on lead, whether you're on the lead in the opening lead or you're on the lead when the opponents have bid, or your side has bid, then you want to make sure that you make leads that are clear to partner. Again, this is covered in the book, and it's also covered on many of the sites. You can just look at standard opening leads, and work with your partner on those because, they make a big difference."