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Bidding.

North opens 1♦ with an awkward 4·4·4·1 hand. We are a little under strength to reply 2♣ so we try 1NT.

Partner, knowing that with a four-card major we would have responded 1♥ or 1♠, raises to 2NT, not knowing how useful his 18 points (including a singleton Jack) will be. We easily have enough to continue to game.

Play.

West leads the ♥Q and we start off by counting our top tricks. On this hand, we have six "toppers" (one Spade, two Hearts and three Diamonds) meaning we must hope to establish three "extras".

Those tricks certainly won't be coming from Spades or Hearts, so they must come from Diamonds and Clubs.

Clubs is our main source of tricks, but the question is, how many Club tricks can we establish?

Conventional wisdom tells us that we should first play the honor(s) from the short side, but we can see a problem here if we let dummy's ♣J ride – the opponents would surely withhold the ♣A and we'd need two entries to our hand…

1. To establish the Club suit;

2. To cash the long Clubs.

Unfortunately there is only one side entry to the closed hand and that is the ♥A. This suggests that we should revise our plan by overtaking dummy's ♣J with a top Club honor so we can keep persisting with the Clubs. How many Club tricks will that give us though?

If our Clubs were headed by the ♣K Q 10 9 8, then we would have four sure Club tricks. Even ♣K Q 10 9 × would give us a good chance to establish four Club tricks; we'd rely on the suit splitting 4-3.

Without many supporting intermediate cards we can only hope to establish two Club tricks. Yes, this means that we will need the ninth trick to come from Diamonds and that means we have to hope for a 3-3 Diamond break.

With this plan in mind, we should take care to win the opening lead in dummy to preserve our ♥A as a later entry. At trick two, we play dummy's ♣J and, when East follows low, we overtake with a top Club and continue with another top Club. This establishes two Club tricks and, as long as we remember not to pitch the ♦5 on our Club winners, the 3-3 Diamond split sees us home.

Nine tricks come from one Spade, two Hearts, four Diamonds and two Clubs. 

[Additional note: There is a small additional chance on this hand that we could take and a tricky reader might opt for the possibility of ducking the ♥Q opening lead in both hands. This gives us an additional chance of playing Hearts to break 3-3 as we would then be able to establish dummy's fourth Heart.

However as West has led the suit it is not likely that he only has three cards in Hearts – further, a Spade shift would risk the contract].