Card combinations
One suit, a number of tricks, and the line that most often gets them.
Today's combination
One suit, one life, and the defenders' cards resolved as you play. Free, and no account needed.
A new one every day at midnight UTC.
Rated
One combination at your rating. One life, and it moves your rating.
Log in to playRush
Easiest first, one life each. Survival or a clock, and three strikes either way.
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 every lesson's prose is. 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 the other side, no line in the world takes four tricks from those cards — which is the honest thing a table like this can tell you, and the reason to look before you play rather than after.
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. The gap between those and the fifty is what the suit is worth to somebody who knows it.
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 is 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 is the share of layouts on which the best line guarantees the number of tricks you asked for. Guarantees is the important word. The defenders are assumed to see all four hands and to play best defence — the card that hurts you most, whether or not it is the card a book would play — so a line is credited only where it works against any defence at all, never where it needs a defender to help. That makes these numbers lower than the ones you get by assuming honest opponents, and it makes them safe to bet a contract on.
The suit is solved rather than looked up. Each holding is worked out from first principles over every way the missing cards can lie, weighted by how likely each lie is before anything is played.
Entries
Most lines need you to be in one hand or the other at particular moments, and moving the lead costs something whichever way it goes. You start in declarer's hand, so leading from there first is free. Each combination shows two counts: what the line printed here spends on the deal it is shown against, and the most it can ever need. The second is the one to plan around — a line you cannot afford on a bad day is a line you cannot play.
Why a holding might not be here
A combination earns 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 the right one, there is nothing to teach and the holding is left out. Holdings of five to eleven cards between the two hands are covered.