COUNT COUNT COUNT!!!!

[OliverC]

I'm not sure I can convince you guys apart from repeating this sort of thing ad nauseam: You have got to spend a few seconds before playing each and every hand to think about the hand. Just think about the hand for a few seconds. Count your tricks and if the number you get to is insufficient, figure out how you might be able to acquire the additional trick or tricks. Make a Plan and don't play a single card before you've  arrived at a plan.

The plan you make is not, as I have said before, set in concrete and can be flexible according to how the play goes. Plans often go stray and need revising, but if you don't have a plan in your head when you start playing to the first trick(s), the chances are that you'll just wander aimlessly about the hand until you go off.

Take this really simple hand, which was a very good example of exactly this happening:

NS Game, Dealer North

South (Dummy)
  10
  Q87
  Q10653
  K643

North (You)
  J52
  AK953
  2
  AQ102

You and Partner (me) have had a simple but effective OCP auction 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 and you can see that this is a really good 21-HCP game that quite a few people will not reach. Moreover, 4 is likely to be a very good sacrifice but Opps have never got into the auction. East leads a small Spade to West's King. West switches to a small Heart. You play low from hand and take East's Jack with Dummy's Queen. How do you plan the play from here?

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Well clearly you've landed in a decent contract even if sub-minimum for points. 5 Hearts, 4 Clubs if they behave, and...

...hmmmm. Not much chance of establishing the Diamonds so where is our 10th trick coming from? The utterly obvious place is from a Spade ruff (which is why West has switched to a Heart at trick 2, of course, in the hope that any ruffing of Spades you can do is going to be reduced). In practice we only need one Spade ruff to get our 10 tricks. What is the safest way to proceed? A Heart back top hand at trick 3 (everyone follows so we know the are 3-2). Now  ruff a Spade in Dummy, cross back to hand with the Ace of Clubs, draw the last trump, cross back to the King of Clubs and, when everyone follows to the second Club, claim our 10 tricks.

That line, a priori, has about a 90% chance of succeeding. It loses only when East has J9xx. The possibility of Clubs being 5-0 (with the person having the void Club also having the last Heart) is small enough that we can dismiss it (if it happens it happens).

Eszter got as far as crossing back to hand with a second round of trumps, but didn't bother with the Spade ruff. She just drew the 3rd round of trumps and now was inevitably 1 down, which lost us -5½ IMPs on the Board rather than gaining us nearly 10 IMPs.

I feel sure that Eszter would have thought about ruffing a Spade if she had spent just 10 seconds right at the start of the hand, counting her likely tricks, realising she would be one short, and coming up with the obvious plan for a 10th trick. Nothing cimplicated. No abstruse squeezes or throw-ins. No need for brain-wearying counting of the hand. Just "5+4 doesn't add up to 10".