To state it simply, a squeeze occurs when we force an opponent to try to hold more cards than there are tricks left in the hand. This is done by having threat cards in multiple suits and forcing an opponent to unguard one of these suits. There are a large variety of different types of squeezes, but here we focus on how to use our threat cards to apply pressure and execute some basic types of squeezes.

When declaring a hand, we often run a long suit of winners and one or both of our opponents run out of cards in that suit. This forces our opponents to discard from another suit, which gives us an opportunity to learn more about the opponent’s hand – there are many inferences available for us based on which suits they choose to discard, and which suits they avoid. Let’s take a moment to place ourselves in “the opponent’s shoes” and see how understanding their difficulties can help us to better “read” an opponent’s discards. Card Reading skills are an important part of all parts of card play and something that we should all spend time working to improve.

When declaring a hand, especially in a notrump contract, honor cards are a simple way to produce winners. With experience, we come to recognize that a long suit, particularly a long, strong one, can be another valuable source of tricks. Other cards can become winners as well. These other cards can grow up into winners in a variety of ways. They may not become tricks immediately, but as the play progresses, these cards become more relevant and pose a greater danger to the defense. We refer to these cards as threat cards, because they are threatening to turn into winners! The opponents must hold on to their cards in these suits (guard these suits) in order to prevent our threat cards from becoming winners. Let’s see how threat cards work and how we can make use of them to make us a more dangerous declarer.

When we look at a card combination where we are missing an honor, our thoughts usually turn to how we should play this suit for the best result.  We generally focus on whether we should play “for the drop” of the missing honor or take a finesse.  But in trying to avoid a loser in this suit, there is sometimes another line of play that we have at our disposal – the smother play.  The smother play produces extra tricks by “dropping” a card in an unorthodox way.

Expert players look for ways to avoid taking a finesse. A finesse is usually a fallback plan that is taken only when no other line of play works. One way to avoid taking a finesse is to get the opponents to lead a suit for us. Of course, most opponents are not cooperative, and do not help us in this way, but there are times when we can force the opponents to lead a suit and accomplish what we want for us. One of the ways to get them to lead a suit is to put them on lead when they happen to have nothing but that suit remaining - but this does not happen all that often. Another way to accomplish this is to eliminate all the other suits and then put the opponents on lead, so they must lead what we want them to. This is a removal play (or stripping the hand) as it takes away the opponent’s other potential “exit” cards. Let’s see how to make this work.