Experienced Declarers keep adding new techniques to their stable to allow them to take more tricks. This week we work on adding another one to your play options — the smoother play.
A long suit is a powerful asset, especially if it is a long, strong suit. When we Declare, this type of suit can be established into winners in a variety of ways. Let’s look at some techniques for developing long suits, and then we should look at what we can do with the suit to help us take more tricks. Long suits are on many of the hands that we hold, so learning to make the best use of them is a key skill.
Play of the Hand
When we declare in a suit contract, then there is a trump suit, and hopefully, we have more of these cards than the opponents (if not, please reconsider your bidding). That means, when we gain the lead, we have the option of attempting to remove all of the opponent’s trump – draw trump. Let’s look at our options and considerations for how and when to do this.
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.
