Actually, when you are playing a 4-4 trump fit, no long hand exists, so assume the hand with the longer side suit (five or more cards) is the long hand. When neither hand has a long side suit, the hand with the stronger trumps is considered the long hand.

When you have a six-card major suit, however many HCP you have, you use a very strange convention to show your major suit to your partner: You respond in the suit beneath your real suit! This means that you respond 2♥ if you have six spades and 2♦ when you have six hearts.

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

If your longest suit is clubs or diamonds, you need 11 or more HCP to respond 2♣ or 2♦. If you don’t have the necessary HCP (you have six to ten HCP), cough up a 1NT response, the catch-all response for all weak hands that don’t have support for your partner’s suit and don’t have a four-card or longer suit to bid at the one level.

When your suit fills the bill for creating extra winners but your equal honors are divided between the two hands, play the high honor card from the short side first. Doing so helps you reach the extra winner(s) you create.

You both want to establish tricks in strong suits. The side holding KQJ10, for example, wants to drive out the ace and establish three tricks. You both want to take tricks with small cards in long suits by relentlessly playing the suit until your opponents run out of cards in the suit. After you get rid of their cards, your remaining cards in that

If your longest suit doesn’t sport any three consecutive honor cards, just lead the fourth-highest card in the suit. Start from the highest card in the suit, count down four places, and throw that fourth-highest card face up on the table. In Figure 17-1, where your longest suit doesn’t have any consecutive honor cards, lead the ♠4, the

Even when length is on your side, you need to play the high honor cards from the short side first. Doing so ensures that the lead ends up in the hand with the length — and therefore the winning tricks. If you don’t play the high honor(s) from the short side first, you run the risk of blocking a suit. You block a suit when you have winning cards

On occasion, you have to do a little work to make those extra winners appear. You may have to drive out two honors in the same suit before you can create any extra winners in that suit. But the bottom line is that the suit you’re working with must be unevenly divided with the greater length in the dummy. You’re spinning your wheels if you try to