[mangurian]

The bidding goes 1NT-p-p-p What/why do you lead holding:

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[P_Marlowe]

Scoring matters, so does the NT strength, but I would guess 15-17.

If it is 15-17, this means, we know the location of 28-30 HCP, p will have something but not a lot, make it at most 5.
I would go with a diamond, which rates to be most passive.

Basically I dont want to give away a trick with my lead, and diamond will be ok as long as p happens to hold
any diamond honor at all.

[mike777]

Slight preference of the 2D over 4H
Why?
Slight higher odds to find an honor in D with partner

[Huibertus]

mangurian, on 2025-May-26, 10:54, said:

The bidding goes 1NT-p-p-p What/why do you lead holding:

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You have the bulk of the combined strength of your partnership. That is why you lead your own suit. So that'd be ♥ or ♦. Partner is bound to have some honors. Pick the suit that offers the highest chance of a single useful card with partner. That is ♦ as the Ace, King or Jack all are helpful. For ♥ the Ace or Queen are helpful, the Jack probably not really.

[mikeh]

I agree with a diamond lead. The spade is obviously wrong…oh, it could work but the odds are extremely high that it won’t.

The club is very committal. It loses a trick, and sometimes a tempo, many times.

It’s really down to a heart and a diamond. One often chooses a major against notrump, if the opps have not looked for a major, but on this hand we can’t infer much about the majors, other than that dummy almost surely doesn’t hold a five card major. He’s usually going to be too weak to bid, when we hold as much as we do.

So…major or minor?

The key is that a heart will often give away a trick immediately when partner lacks the Queen or the Ace. Picture declarer with AQxx or dummy with Axx and declarer the queen. If we’re hoping to establish winners without giving away a trick, we need more from partner in hearts than we do in diamonds, the diamond Jack helps us a lot but the heart jack often won’t…or it does but at the cost of a tempo.

When partner rates to be weak, and you have two close possibilities, choose the one that will usually require less from partner than the other.

Bear in mind that nobody can claim…or should claim…that any lead in these kinds of situations will ‘always’ work better on the actual hand than an alternative. Bridge is a game of percentages….winning players tend to consistently choose plays that maximize their chances, recognizing that on occasion their play doesn’t work out.

One further consideration: we rate to be on lead ore than once…possibility three more times or so. We’ll have a lot more information next time…dummy will be visible, we can often reverse engineer declarer’s hand from his play to trick one and how he plays to trick two, and of course partner may have helped, positively other negatively. Say partner plays the diamond Jack at trick one, and dummy doesn’t hold 4 diamonds. We may have an easy diamond queen next time. The same argument is less likely in hearts. This is a minor factor but it argues in favour of diamonds.

[HardVector]

I'm going to be an outlier on this one, but I'd lead the A of spades. Spades is probably partner's suit and I don't want to break anything else. The best you can do is wait for declarer to play them and win a grand total of 2 spades...maybe. Or, you can find partner with Jxxxx and an entry and talk declarer into taking their K at trick 2. I like going for as much as possible when it's going to take 7 tricks to set.

[Huibertus]

HardVector, on 2025-May-28, 23:04, said:

I'm going to be an outlier on this one, but I'd lead the A of spades. Spades is probably partner's suit and I don't want to break anything else. The best you can do is wait for declarer to play them and win a grand total of 2 spades...maybe. Or, you can find partner with Jxxxx and an entry and talk declarer into taking their K at trick 2. I like going for as much as possible when it's going to take 7 tricks to set.

You're probably right ♠ is partner's suit. What the ♠ lead does is it develops declarer's ♠ tricks (K or J or both), and then you'll find partner with high ♠ and no entry later on, and when declare has to hand you a trick you still have to open up suits but now are a tempo late, potentially too late. You simply are too strong to lead partner's suit, that is what you do when partner has the entries and you are weak yourself.