This Week in Bridge
(615) Fundamentals of Trick Taking – Developing a Suit
© AiB Robert S. Todd
Level: 3 of 10 robert@advinbridge.com
General
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.
Declarer’s Long Suit
When we are the Declarer in an NT contract, we usually count our winners. Long suits are a great potential source of winners. We develop these winners through:
Promotion – turning our cards into the master cards.
Length – exhausting the opponents of cards in the suit.
Finessing – avoiding their honors.
And more
When we are declaring in a suit contract, then when we develop a long suit in our hand, it is usually the trump suit. We use our long and strong trump suit to remove the opponent’s suit, but we are not then under pressure to “run” the rest of the winners in this suit. We usually keep our trump to maintain control of the hand.
When declaring in a suit contract, we can also develop a “side suit” in our hand. We may do this after we draw trump, to avoid the opponent’s ruffing our winners in this side suit–if dummy has length in our suit, this is a good plan. But if dummy has shortness in our side suit, then we may choose to use dummy’s trump to ruff our losers in this side suit.
Ruffing Losers
Often, we use dummy’s trump to ruff our losers.
Example 1
Dummy
♠ 6
Declarer
♠ A432
Here we ruff our losing ♠432 before we draw trump (if dummy has enough trump for us to do so). Sometimes we do not just ruff our side suit losers, but we establish the suit into winners as we do so.
Sometimes, in the process of ruffing our losers, we establish our side suit instead of ruffing all of our little cards.
Example 2
Dummy
♥ 76
Declarer
♥ AK432
With a suit like this, if the suit splits 3-3, then we can draw all of dummy’s trump, and then play the side suit and lose a card in this suit. But if we retain a trump in the dummy, then we can play the ♥A, ♥K, and then ruff a trump. If the suit splits worse, then we will either need to lose more cards in this suit or ruff more of them. Because we do not know how the suit is going to split before we play the hand (if only we could know this game would be much easier), we often ruff this suit before drawing all of the trump.
Example 3
Dummy
♦ 7
Declarer
♦ AK432
With a suit like this, we need to be careful. If we play this suit without drawing all the trump by playing the ♦A, then ♦K, and then another Diamond we increase the chance of one of our opponent’s overruffing. Instead, it is best to
Dummy’s Long Suit
When dummy has a long suit, we often establish this suit and use it to produce discards from our hand. If we are playing in a suit contract and our hand is the long trump side, then we often use dummy’s long suit as discards for our losers. But sometimes it is easy to establish these winners/discards, and other times it requires a lot of work. We must both turn the cards in this side suit into winners and be able to return to it (have an entry) to “cash” these winners.
In a suit contract, developing a long side suit in the dummy is done using a large number of techniques.
Promotion
Length
Finesse
Ruffing out the suit
Ruffing finesse
Loser on Loser play
And more…
But in addition to using these techniques to establish the suit, we also must manage our entries and make an effective play for how to produce a trick.
Example 3
If we are in a suit contract, like Spades, and have only one entry to the dummy (say in Hearts), then this may affect the way we play a suit like this.
Dummy
♣ AQJT6
Declarer
♣ 5
We cannot play up to the Ace and then ruff a Club. If we do, we will need the ♣K to fall doubleton – highly unlikely. Instead, we play to the ♣A and then lead the ♣Q and let it go (if it is not covered). If LHO has the ♣K, then we will lose one Club trick but likely have 4 winners that we can return to. The key to this play is that we had only one outside entry and this limited our options for how we play this suit. The ruffing finesse became our best play.
Conclusion
When we declare a hand, how we make use of our long suits is a key partner of taking tricks. When we play in a suit contract, then the trump suit will clearly be a key part of our play. But long side suits are also an important and complex part of taking our tricks. There are a lot of techniques we can use to develop these suits and many considerations (like transportation and whether we have immediate other losers) that shape our decision-making process. Make sure that you keep working on your Declarer play skills and do everything you can to get the most out of your long suits.