Planning the play

The pause

Nothing you do later recovers a wrong card at trick one. Ducking a trick you should have won, winning one you should have ducked, or entering the wrong hand can each be fatal before you have thought at all.

Take thirty seconds. Nobody minds, and the players who mind are the ones who would have taken it themselves.

In notrump, count winners

A winner is a trick you can take right now without giving up the lead. Count them suit by suit, then compare with what the contract needs.

3NT needs nine. Suppose you count six. The question is not "how do I play this" — it is where do three more tricks come from, and there are only four answers:

• Length — drive out the honours in a long suit and the small cards become winners.
• Force — knock out an ace or king to promote the cards beneath it.
• Finesse — see the finesse.
• Squeeze or endplay — rare, and not where to start.

Pick the safest source that gets you to nine, and start on it before the opponents establish theirs.

In a suit contract, count losers

Winners are the wrong count here, because trumps make tricks out of nothing. Count what you might lose instead — from the hand with the longer trumps, looking at the top three cards of each suit.

4♠ allows three losers. Count five, and your job is to make two disappear. Again there are only a few ways:

• Ruff them in the short trump hand — ruffing in the long hand usually gains nothing.
• Discard them on a winner in the other hand.
• Finesse for the missing honour.
• Establish a suit and throw losers on it.

Drawing trumps, and when not to

Draw trumps as a default. Leaving them out lets the defenders ruff your winners, which is a worse problem than most alternatives.

Do not draw them first when:

• You need dummy's trumps to ruff losers. Drawing them removes the very tricks you were counting on.
• You need an entry that a trump provides.
• A suit must be set up first and drawing trumps costs you the tempo.

The usual compromise is to draw some and stop — count how many the defenders have left and whether any can ruff something you care about.

Entries are the thing that runs out

A long suit is worth nothing if you cannot reach it after establishing it. This is the most common way a well-analysed hand still fails.

Count entries to each hand as part of the plan, not afterwards. If dummy has five diamonds and one outside entry, you need to knock out the missing honour while that entry is still there.

Playing an honour from the wrong hand is how entries get wasted — a habit worth watching for in the replay of any contract that failed by one trick.

The whole plan, in four questions

1. How many tricks do I need, and how many do I have?
2. Where do the missing ones come from?
3. What can go wrong — a bad break, a ruff, the wrong opponent on lead?
4. Which order does all of that in, and do I have the entries for it?

Four questions, thirty seconds, on every hand you declare. It is worth more than the next five conventions you could learn.