Proper trump management could potentially take several hundred pages to fully cover, so I will only point out the most basic and damaging errors made.
A) The Opening lead. With a hand containing a long spade suit, many average-level players will lead their short suit first in order to break spades. This is a play that works against your hand, as it weakens your spade suit. In fact, your opponents would do well to continue leading that suit to force you to use up your spades.
Your goal with this type of hand is to use your spades as leads rather than as cuts. You hope that someone else will open the spade suit for you (either partner or an opponent), and then use your spades as leads later on. By leading your longest suit instead, you hope to establish winners in that suit early on and prevent yourself from being forced to ruff. Save your short suit leads for when you have poor spades (“runts”) or when you want to get to the spades suit early for partner when he has a strong spade suit.
B) Leading partner’s void. I see this error all the time and it is closely related to the above. The hand with the long spade suit is leading spades, and partner runs out of spades to return back. Without a spade to lead, he decides to lead into his partner's void side suit. This further weakens the strong spade suit holding, and ends up destroying the hand in most cases. You are now a third opponent when you make a lead like this as that would be a good strategy for the opposition (leading into the long spade holder’s void). This is a great way to kill your partner’s timing and control of the hand.
C) Leading 3 rounds of spades. Another common error is leading too many rounds of spades. In general (80% of cases), two rounds of spades is correct. A third round can be damaging in most cases. Assuming your side has the majority of spades, normally one opponent is out of spades by the third round -- and in general, when one opponent is out of spades, it is bad economically to lead spades as you are killing 2 spades for every 1 you “pull”. Even worse, the opponent left with a spade may have the boss and now you have really hurt your prospects. Even if the opponent with a spade doesn’t have the boss, it can still be very damaging to lead a third round of spades. Your side may need an additional spade later on, and the player can pull the last spade at a later point in the hand. Of course, there are situations where a 3rd round is necessary and makes sense (when your side clearly has the boss – and the opponents have no other prospects), but these are the exception. Another exception isO when you are in a situation where your partner is the short spade holder, and the spades are split evenly among the opponents, this is a good opportunity to lead a third round and kill 2 spades with 1 of yours.
