Top of the Short
Now it’s time to learn your first card-play technique!
Imagine you have the following suit and you are trying to decide how to play it.
Dummy:
♠ A Q J 6 5
Hand:
♠ K 4
You may think that, given that you have the four top cards in the suit, that it doesn’t matter which order you play them in… but it does!
Let’s see what happens if we win the A♠ first.
Dummy:
♠ A Q J 6 5
Hand:
♠ K 4
Whichever spade we play now, we will end up in our hand, as the K♠ is singleton and therefore cannot fail to win the trick. But once we are in our hand, we cannot keep playing the suit, as we won’t have any left: the suit is said to be blocked. If we play small to our K, the suit looks as follows:
Dummy:
♠ A Q J 6 5
Hand:
♠ K 4
As the lead is now in our hand, we are in a situation where we have spade winners in the dummy that we cannot reach because we have no spades to allow us to cross over there: this may mean that we have to try to find an entry in another suit or sometimes never make the tricks.
How could we have avoided this problem? By winning the ♠K first!
Dummy:
♠ A Q J 6 5
Hand:
♠ K 4
Playing the K♠ first means that we still have the 4♠ as an entry to the dummy: we can then play five rounds of ♠s without a problem (as long as neither opponent has 5 of them!) because we will already be in the right hand to do so.
Luckily, there is a handy rule which will ensure that we never end up blocking the suit and getting stuck in the wrong hand.
‘Top of the short’ rule: if you have a sequence of consecutive high cards split between the two hands, choose to win the honour in the shorter holding first.
Note: It will not matter whether you start with a small card towards this honour or whether you play the honour straightaway – it depends which hand you are starting from! In the above example, playing the 5 up to the K is exactly like playing the K out of hand and following with the 5.
This comes up all the time and I recommend ingraining this as a habit, even if you are not short of entries to the long hand: then you will never go wrong!