At trick one, we want to make sure we’re taking a moment to plan before we start playing. When we’re playing in notrumps, start by counting your sure winners. In this hand, we’re in 3NT and we have eight sure winners. What is the best way we can play this bridge hand to create another winner? In each suit, how many extra tricks might we be able to develop?
Counting Winners & Losers in Bridge – Free Lessons
Thank you for joining us for these free lessons taught by Adam Parrish – access the lessons below.
Adam teaches weekly bridge lessons and supervised play sessions taught here at Learn Bridge Online – All are welcome!
As declarer in bridge, it is so important to come up with a plan before playing a card from dummy. The first step after the opening lead comes down will be to count your winners & losers. In this short course, Adam Parrish will guide us through four hands, sharing how we can plan our play ofter the opening lead comes down, and even what to do when it looks like our plan needs to change.
Register to access all four lesson videos and to play through the hands featured in the videos.
Adam Parrish is among the country’s top bridge teachers and authors. He has written three acclaimed books and writes a monthly column in the ACBL Bridge Bulletin. He teaches students all around the world, both online and in person. He is also one of the partners of Bridge Winners, the web’s premier bridge discussion site. Adam lives in New York City and heads up the online teaching program at Honors Bridge Club, the country’s largest club.
Lessons
Count Your Winners – Hand 2
As with the previous hand, we are in notrump, so lets start by counting our winners. This time we’re in 6NT and it might look at first like this will be an easy hand to play with the chance even of picking up an extra trick. But, when we find out there is an unfortunately 5-1 spade split, we have to re-evaluate our plan. Now we can only count 11 winners. Where else can we look for our 12th trick? Is there a better bet than the 50/50 heart finesse?
Count Your Losers – Hand 1
When we’re in a suit contract, start by counting your losers. Going suit-by-suit, we see that we have two spade losers, two heart losers, one diamond loser, and no club losers. You might ask, “But dummy only has a doubleton in hearts and we have the ace and king. How can we have two losers?” Until we actually ruff those hearts, they are still losers. When we are counting our losers in bridge, we have to count for every possible loser. The question with this hand is: how can we get rid of those heart losers?
Count Your Losers – Hand 2
In this hand, we’re in a 6♠ contract. Whenever we’re declarer in a suit contract, we can start by counting our losers as soon as the opening lead comes down. We have two potential losers in spades and one more in hearts. How should we plan our play to turn our two spade losers into one?