Planning the play

The pause

A wrong card at trick one is often impossible to recover from. Ducking a trick you should have won, winning one you should have ducked, or entering the wrong hand can each cost the contract before you've made a plan. Taking thirty seconds to plan at this point is normal and expected at any table.

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 where three more tricks will come from. There are four main sources:

• 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: rarely needed, so try the others first.

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

In a suit contract, count losers

Here you count what you might lose, because your trumps can ruff and turn losers into tricks. Count 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.

Don't draw them first when:

• You need dummy's trumps to ruff losers. Drawing them removes the 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.

Count your entries

A long suit is worth nothing if you can't reach it after establishing it.

Count entries to each hand as part of the plan. If dummy has five diamonds and one outside entry, you need to knock out the missing honour while that entry is still there.

Entries are often wasted by playing an honour from the wrong hand. Look for it when you replay 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?

Ask them on every hand you declare. With practice it takes about thirty seconds.