Card combinations
Learn the best way to play a single suit for the tricks you need.
Today's combination
One suit to play, with one life. Free, and no account needed.
A new one every day at midnight UTC.
Rated
A combination matched to your rating. One life, and the result changes your rating.
Log in to playRush
Easiest first, one life each. Play untimed or against the clock. Three strikes ends it.
Log in to playLearn one
Thirteen lessons, in order: how suits break, then the techniques, a board at a time. A wrong card is refused and explained, and you try it again.
The first three lessons are free, and you can read every lesson for free. The exam is forty-eight positions, one life each.
Look up a holding
Type the two hands: A K Q J T for the honours, x for a small card.
Or deal any combination (both hands and a target) and play it out against the dealer.
A worked example
Say dummy holds J9x and declarer holds AQTx, and you need all four tricks. The table gives that line a 50% chance, and the line itself is three finesses: lead the nine from dummy and play small, lead the jack and play the ten, then lead small to the queen, keeping the ace for last. Dummy holds exactly three cards, which is exactly three leads, and each one wins in dummy so the lead is already there for the next. It costs one entry.
Fifty per cent because the whole line depends on the king sitting in the hand that plays immediately after dummy, where each finesse traps it. When it sits on the other side, no line takes four tricks from those cards.
Cashing the ace and queen from the top takes four tricks almost never, and leading small towards strength takes them about eighteen times in a hundred. Knowing the right line gains you the difference between those and fifty.
How to read a holding
A holding is written from the top down: A K Q J T are the ace, king, queen, jack and ten, and x stands for any card too small to matter. AQTx is therefore the ace, queen, ten and one small card. You can type 10 instead of T, and you can type the small cards out as numbers if that's how your book prints them. AQT4 and AQTx are the same holding, because which small card you hold cannot change how the suit plays.
What the percentage means
It's how often the best line is sure to take the tricks you asked for. We assume the defenders can see all four hands and always play the card that hurts you most, even where a book would play something else. That makes these numbers lower than book odds, but you can rely on them.
Each holding is solved over every way the missing cards can lie, weighted by how likely each lie is before any card is played.
Entries
Most lines need you to be in one hand or the other at particular moments, and each change of lead uses an entry. You start in declarer's hand, so leading from there first is free. Each combination shows two counts: what the line shown uses on its deal, and the most it could ever need. Plan around the second one.
Why a holding might not be here
A holding gets a page only when the play is worth thinking about. If every card wins the same number of tricks, or the obvious card is already right, it's left out. We cover holdings of five to eleven cards between the two hands.