16 Planning a No Trump contract

I take it you have read my last tip about planning the hand. NT planning isn’t quite the same as trumps but it’s simpler, so we’ll start there. Although in cloud-cuckoo land we would have two stoppers in every suit, it’s not going to be like that, so the first thing to do when dummy goes down is to identify our weakest suit, the one we fear most because of fewest stoppers, and if the defence have done the right thing it’s the suit led. We can also identify our strongest suit and indeed in many cases will already know it.

But don’t start playing yet, there’s a plan to be made,  Starting with the suit led, count how many top tricks you can see already staring you in the face, and I mean TOP tricks: aces and kings, AKQ sequences whether in one or both hands. In other words, if you were to play off these tricks now, you would never lose the lead till they were all cashed. If this total equals your contract, whether 7, 8 or 9 tricks, then you should seriously consider running them off now and making sure.  But normally you cannot see your contract at trick one, there will be holes in your holdings where you have to lose a trick to establish winners. (Say you have KQJTxxx, you know there isn’t a single trick there till you’ve knocked out their ace.). This is when you decide whether to hold up your ace of their suit at trick one; you don’t have to hold up your stopper because the Rule of Seven says so, and if I have  double stopper (AKx or AQx) I usually won’t hold up at all. Some authorities also say that any four cards is a stopper, so Axxx is a double. Only apply the Rule of Seven or Eight if the ace is your only stopper.

OK, that was step one but we still need to get our contract every time. Realise that there are only three ways of making tricks in NT:

a) Top Honour Tricks, ie brute force

b) Suit length tricks, ie no losers or one with tricks to lose first.

c) Finesses.

With both b) and c), once you lose the lead there is the danger of the enemy suit coming at you, and you have no trump suit to regain the lead, hence NT contracts are a race to see which side can set up their suit first. Prefer b) to c) (never take a finesse till you have to.) and indeed most NT hands will be played on suit length. So unless the rare a) beckons, making the plan is simply a matter of deciding which suit needs setting up. Go for it quickly, before your stoppers run out.

So in a nutshell, planning a NT contract comes down to counting your obvious winners and then finding ways to make the number up to your contract. But there’s one more thing: have you got enough entries between your two hands?  This is perhaps the only other thing that may affect how you play trick one itself.  Preserve and manage your entries.