In this hand, both Acol and Standard players will find themselves as declarer in 3NT. When dummy comes down, we see we only have six sure winners. Anyone else start to worry at this point?
Should I Run this Honour? When wondering whether to take a finesse by running an honour, check how many cards you have backing up your lower honours. The longer the sequence, the stronger the sequence: look for tens and nines in particular.
The results for this hand were evenly spit. What made the difference? Graeme encourages to dive in deeper looking for all the clues that help us see the unseen hands, while, at the same time, taking a broader perspective beyond the results of this (or any) particular hand.
A free defence lesson with Pam Livingston: For half the hands that are played, we are defending . Instead of thinking "oh its their turn to have the fun" let's turn that around to "here's our opportunity to get a good score!"
We may look at a suit such as T432 and think we have no tricks there so we can safely discard the 2. However, that might let the contract through! How do we know?
In this instructive bridge hand there is no good or even average lead available so we choose the lesser of many evils.
When should we play our sure winners defending against 1NT? And what other clues can we find that will help us plan our play?