Endplays

The idea

A finesse asks where a card is. An endplay makes the question irrelevant — you are not going to lead the suit at all.

You hold ♠ A Q opposite two small and need both tricks. Lead towards the queen and you win when the king is on your left: 50%.

Or make an opponent lead spades. Now it does not matter who holds the king. If the player on your right leads a low spade, the queen wins; if they lead the king, the ace takes it and the queen is good. That is 100%, and the whole of the technique is engineering the position where they must.

What you need

• Trumps under control, and usually at least one left in each hand.
• Side suits you can strip — cash the winners and ruff the rest out.
• A card to hand over the lead with, and it must reach the opponent you want on lead rather than their partner.
• A tenace to protect — the thing you did not want to lead yourself.

How to do it

1. Draw trumps, keeping one in each hand if you want a ruff-and-discard to be available.
2. Cash your winners in the side suits you are eliminating.
3. Ruff the remainder out, so neither hand has a card left in those suits.
4. Throw the opponent in — usually by conceding a trick you were losing anyway.
5. Take what they give you. They have nothing safe left.

Step four is where it goes wrong most often: the trick you concede must be one you could not avoid losing. Giving up a trick you could have won turns a certainty back into a finesse with extra steps.

The ruff and discard

The other half of why an endplay works. When both your hands are void in a suit and an opponent leads it, you ruff in one hand and throw a loser from the other.

Two losers gone for one trick. That is why the elimination has to be complete — a single card left in a stripped suit gives the opponent a safe exit, and the whole plan is off.

When to look for one

Every time you are about to take a finesse for the contract. That is the trigger.

• You have a two-way guess and no count. An endplay skips the guess entirely.
• You have a loser you cannot avoid. That is the throw-in card, free.
• Your side suits are short. Short suits are cheap to eliminate.
• The count says the finesse is wrong. Then it is the only line left.

It also combines. Strip the hand first and you can still fall back on the finesse if the throw-in does not materialise — you have lost nothing by preparing.

A word about squeezes

The other famous ending, and much rarer than its reputation. A squeeze makes an opponent who is guarding two suits give one of them up, because they have run out of cards to spare.

It needs conditions an endplay does not — the count rectified, the right cards in the right hands, and it is worth learning properly rather than in a paragraph. Endplays come up several times a session; squeezes come up a few times a year.

Learn this one first. It pays far more often.