A famous bridge professional once advised that you should play hands as if you were browsing at a yard sale. Try everything out before you buy! One should test the merchandise before buying in to a line of play.
Before reading on, you may want to make your own plan for how to play this hand. Hint: Make a special note of your plays to the first three tricks.
When west led the spade king, south counted sure tricks. Six were present "on top", with several play options for reaching nine. Safety was a primary goal, so our expert south planned the hand carefully, and succeeded because he identified the four "key plays" he needed before playing to the first trick.
He made the 1st key play by holding up his ace of spades. He held up again when spades were continued, knowing that this aggressive east-west pair would open a weak two with an attractive 5 card suit. He then of course planned to avoid the dangerous heart finesse if at all possible.
With east's spades removed, south made another key play by testing diamonds before finessing in clubs. He knew that a losing club finesse would force him to depend on either a 3-3 diamond split or that heart finesse, and that a competent east would surely return a heart whether holding the king or not, to force south to make an immediate "blind guess" between diamonds and hearts for his game-going trick.
South therefore played diamonds next, first with the king, then queen, then ace of diamonds, witnessing the fall of the suit and leaving himself in the correct hand for the club finesse. With diamonds split, the club finesse was taken and lost, but south won the heart return and had 9 tricks, taking 4 diamonds, 3 clubs and one trick in each major suit.
Did you notice that the two additional key plays were not mentioned above? They were in recognizing the need for the correct discards from north on spade tricks 2 and 3! The success of south's "try before you buy" plan required that both of dummy's 4-card minor suits be preserved. South therefore discarded two hearts on tricks 2 and 3.
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