COUNT YOURSELF LUCKY

I don't see" said Dag the Romulan, "what difference it makes knowing how many of a suit your partner holds. I want to know where their Aces are!"

Spock chuckled to himself. "But what if partner holds no Aces?"

"Then I wanna know about Kings, Queens, whatever. It's all about the big cards anyway."

"Not at all!" countered Spock firmly. "On the contrary there are a lot of situations where you need to know how many of a suit partner has, simply so you can work out how many cards DECLARER has in a particular suit. Think about it. You're defending a slam and at trick 12, you have so far won one trick and need another one to defeat the contract. You now hold  QD and QH, both of which you know to be winners. Declarer leads a Club. Which Queen do you discard? Is it a guess? Do you toss a coin? Is one suit prettier than the other? How on earth can we know?"

"It's always a guess in those situations," said the Romulan. "50 - 50."

"No, " said Spock, "In fact if you play properly with your partner it is NEVER a guess. Why? Because partner should show you the length in each of their suits so it is known to you exactly what Declarer's distribution is, so you know exactly which Q to keep and so defeat the contract. Letting slams slide through is always a disaster."

"How can partner tell me all that without kickin' me under the table? That's ridiculous."

"Very simply. When you follow suit, both of you should always play a High card followed by a Low card to show an even number in a suit. This is called a Peter. Now if you know partner has 2 or 4 in a particular suit, you can see how many you and dummy hold so you can soon tell how many Declarer is likely to hold by subtracting that number from 13."

"What if they hold an Odd number - 3 or 5, say?"

"Then you don't Peter. You play the cards from Low to High instead."

It's a good idea to train yourself to do this all the time - in every suit. So it naturally becomes a habit to count out Declarer's shape. Then you'll never have to guess again which Q to keep!