Most bridge players are well trained to make a plan about winners or losers as declarer, but we should be making a similar plan when we are defending!
Trick Taking
One of the ways that we develop additional tricks (beyond Quick Tricks) as declarer is by using our long suits – Length Tricks. These tricks usually depend upon good luck or “suits splitting well.” This can sometimes be done immediately (without giving up the lead) or sometimes requires some work to develop these tricks. As a defender, when we are on lead (especially opening lead against a NT contract) we use a similar technique for developing tricks from our long suits. Let’s see how we use our long suits to develop tricks as a defender.
Trick Taking
We develop a lot of techniques and skills for taking tricks as Declarer. In this case, we can see the dummy and our hand (and thus all of our sides assets). Many of these techniques have parallels for how we take tricks on Defense. These skills are used in the middle of the hand (when we can see our hand and the dummy) and they are used on Open lead, even when we cannot see anything other than our hand. Let’s take a look at some techniques we first learn as a Declarer and see how we use them on Defense.
2/1 Game Forcing
When we agree to play 2/1 GF as our bidding system, then that is not the end of our decision-making process. We need to discuss our follow-up bidding and other initial agreements. The goal is this article is to give you a list of questions to discuss with your partners, to make sure that you are getting the most out of your 2/1 GF system. Let’s start out with a list of the question and then we’ll do some discussions of options below.
Play of the Hand
Getting the most out of the cards we hold is our goal when we are the Declarer or when we are defending a hand. That means we want to use our cards to allow us to take as many tricks as possible, while making it as difficult as possible for the opponents to take tricks. Let’s take a look at how we try to accomplish these feats based on when we play to a trick – our perspective will be different in each of these situations.
Play
When we play our hand in a suit contract, we analyze our hand in terms of losers. First, we identify the losers that we have little to no chance of getting rid of. Next, we try to find the potential losers that we may be able to avoid losing. Once we have identified these potential losers, then we need to make a plan for how not to lose these tricks. Often, there is only one way to dispose of this loser. But sometimes we will have options for how we may dispose of losers. Options mean choices. And choices can lead to difficult decisions. Let’s look at some of the options that we may have for disposing of our losers and try to figure out how to make good choices.
