Bridge for Dummies

When you need to establish extra tricks, pick the suit you plan to work with and start establishing immediately. Do not take your sure tricks in other suits until you establish your extra needed tricks. Then take all your tricks in one giant cascade. Please reread this tip!

Your high-card points (HCP): Barring exceptions, you should have at least 12 HCP to make an opening bid. (See Chapter 9 for more information on calculating your HCP.) Your distribution (the way your cards are divided): Normally, you open the bidding in your longest suit, which typically has four or more cards.

Look at the honor cards at the head of your suit and estimate how many tricks you think you can take with those honors. Add an automatic three to that number.

When you get a great hand like this, you usually open 2♣, the strongest opening bid in bridge. The 2♣ bid basically tells your partner that when you have a long suit, you can make a game contract in your own hand. For example, if you open 2♣ with long spades, you should be able to take ten tricks in your own hand with spades trump or the next thing

When you have three four-card suits, open 1♦. However, if your singleton is a diamond, open 1♣. This rule doesn’t mean that every time you open 1♦ your partner expects you to have three four-card suits. But he will be at least alive to that possibility.

The answer to too many losers is being able to take tricks with the smaller cards attached to five- or six-card suits — usually, but not always, in the dummy.

You should usually try to draw trumps as soon as possible. Get your opponents’ pesky trump cards out of your hair. Then you can sit back and watch as your winning tricks come home safely to your trick pile.

Instead of allowing your opponents to trump your sure tricks, play your higher trumps early on in the hand. Because your opponents must follow suit, you can remove their lower trumps before you take your sure tricks. If you can extract their trumps, you effectively remove their fangs. This extraction is called drawing or pulling trumps. Drawing tru

Notice that in the cards in Figure 12-1, you rebid a six-card club suit. You can also rebid a five-card suit, but you rarely do because you almost always have something better to tell your partner. As a general rule, the responder assumes that the opener has a six-card suit when the opener rebids his original suit.