Here we look at how to find the Queen — the two-way finesse!
Play of the Hand
When we declare a hand, especially in a Notrump contract, there are two common assets that help us produce tricks. The first are our honor cards, which we quantify using High Card Points. We normally use these honor cards as quick tricks or to capture the opponent’s honors. The other way we usually take tricks is with long suits. Long suits (especially strong ones) can be used to take tricks with their little cards by running the opponents out of cards in that suit. When we declare a hand, we may have a long suit in our hand or in the dummy. We can use either of these to establish additional tricks – often called length tricks. Let’s look at how we try to set up these additional winners.
Play of the Hand
Learning to take tricks is a key part of developing our card play skills. There are a large number of techniques for taking tricks, and it is important to be able to use these to help our side collect our winners. Let’s look at some of these fundamental techniques.
Play of the Hand
When it’s our turn to play a card to a trick, then a key thing to consider is which player we are at the table. Are we playing to the trick first, second, third, or last? When we play to a trick, it affects our strategy for how we use our cards. There are some guidelines for what to “second hand low, third hand high”. Let’s look at the pros and cons of playing to a trick in each of the positions and see why these are suggestions for us.
Play of the Hand
When declaring in a suit contract, one of the most exciting ways to win tricks is to trump with our small trump. This is especially satisfying when we can trump the opponent’s honor cards – like their Aces and Kings! If we do this ruffing in both our hand and in the dummy, then we can do some significant damage to the opponent’s potential winners. Let’s see how we can use the technique to take as many tricks as possible.
Play of the Hand
When we look at a card combination in a suit, we normally focus on how we can best play these cards to produce the most tricks in this suit. But remember that our goal is to use all of our cards to produce the maximum number of tricks from them. That means that sometimes we play a particular suit in a less-than-optimal fashion (differently than if we were only playing that suit, or looking that suit up in a book), in order to allow ourselves to take the maximum number of overall tricks. One of reasons that we may play a suit differently than a textbook will tell us to do is to give us additional entries to one of the hands. One of the ways that we may try to produce additional entries is by taking an unnecessary or less than optimal finesse. Let’s see how this can work to our advantage.
