The finesse

How it works

Dummy holds ♥ A Q 4 and you hold three small. Lead a small heart from your hand towards dummy and play the queen.

If the player on your left holds the king, they have already played before dummy, and they cannot beat the queen without spending the king, which the ace then captures. You win two tricks.

If the king is on your right, they play it after the queen and you win one. Fifty-fifty, decided by which opponent was dealt one card.

The ones worth recognising

• Simple finesse. A Q opposite small, as above. One missing honour, one guess.
• Repeated finesse. A Q J opposite small — finesse, return to hand, and finesse again. Two chances at the same card.
• Two-way finesse. A J opposite K 10, missing the queen. You can finesse either opponent, so the auction and the count decide which.
• Ruffing finesse. K Q J opposite a void in a suit contract. Lead the king; if it is covered you ruff, and the queen and jack are now winners.

Eight ever, nine never

Missing the queen, with eight cards between the hands, finesse. With nine, play for the drop — cash the ace and king and hope the queen falls.

The reasoning is worth more than the rhyme. With nine cards, four are missing and split 2-2 slightly more often than the finesse succeeds. With eight, five are missing, a 3-2 split is normal, and the queen will not drop.

It is close, and any actual information beats it. An opponent who preempted, or who showed shortage, has told you where the length is, and the count of the hand outranks any rule of thumb.

When not to finesse

This is the part that separates competent declarers from hopeful ones.

• When you do not need the trick. Count your winners first. A finesse that risks the contract to gain an overtrick is a bad bet at any form of scoring but matchpoints, and often there too.
• When a suit will break instead. Establishing a long suit is often better than 50%, and it does not depend on one opponent holding one card.
• When you can combine chances. Cash a top honour first in case the singleton king falls, then finesse. Two chances beat one, and it usually costs nothing to take them in the right order.
• When the finesse loses to the danger hand. A losing finesse that puts the wrong opponent on lead can cost more than the trick itself.
• When an endplay is available. Making an opponent lead the suit for you turns a 50% guess into a certainty.

Count the hand before you guess

A finesse is what you do when you have run out of information. Before taking one, take the free information available:

1. The auction. An opponent who opened holds most of the missing high cards.
2. The opening lead. It told you something about that suit and often about the hand.
3. The count. Play out the other suits first and the shape may tell you where the honour must be.

The best declarers finesse no more often than anyone else. They just finesse later, when it has stopped being a coin flip.

Where to practise it

Everything above is about when to finesse. The other half of the question is how — which card, from which hand, and against which of the missing honours — and that has an exact answer for every holding there is. The finesse lesson is four holdings played a card at a time, and it sits inside a course on suit combinations that starts with the break odds every one of these decisions rests on. If you would rather just look a holding up, the reference table has the best line for all of them.