Counting Winners

One	Two	Three	Four
Five	Six	Seven	Eight
Nine	Ten	Eleven	Twelve
Thirteen	Fourteen	Fifteen	Sixteen
Seventeen	Eighteen	Nineteen	Twenty
Twenty-One	Twenty-Two	Twenty-Three	Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five	Twenty-Six	Twenty-Seven	Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine	Thirty	Thirty-one	Thirty-two
Thirty-three	Thirty-four	Thirty-five	Thirty-six
Thirty-seven	Thirty-eight	Thirty-nine	Forty

Traditionally, one counts winners in no trump and losers in a trump contract. But I recommend counting both winners and losers in a trump contract. One reason for this this is to see if the total comes out to13. But a far more important reason is that in counting winners, you tend to formulate a line of play that brings you those winners, or that is likely to, as opposed to counting losers, figuring you can live with that number, as the declarer did on Hand Number One, and proceeding merrily with the presumption of two losers and finding to his regret that he had only 9 winners. So if counting both winners and losers seems too much of a chore in the moderate haste of play, then I recommend counting winners, even in trump.

Now, a few qualifications are in order. There are trump hands where the count of losers is the easiest and most obvious count to make and I don't say I'll never discuss a hand in terms of losers. Further, early in most hands, before you know what finesses are on and what splits you're going to get in suits where the split will make a difference, you can't come to an exact count of winners and losers and I shouldn't convey the impression that you should be up to this. So perhaps I should amend the above statement to say, At that point where finesses and splits are taken care of and the hand seems settled, then the total of losers should add up to 13. And if it doesn't, you're far likelier to find that the discrepancy is made up of losers than of winners.

On the first hand, with solid hearts and clubs, nothing in diamonds, and with no spades in his hand after trick one, declarer thought the hand was all over. At that point, his winners and losers should have added up to 13. And when they didn't, he would have avoided some grief if he'd asked why they didn't. So early in the hand, you're not (usually) going to get an exact count. Still, an idea of where your winners are likely to come from should help develop your best line of play.

So in a 3 no contract, for instance, I would start with a count of top winners that I could cash immediately. You start with a count of top winners because when you have enough, you don't want to fiddle around jeopardizing your contract. It's not unheard of for a declarer to go down when he had his winners in hand to cash out. From the certain, you go to winners you can develop, such as knocking out an ace with a holding of K Q, and from there to probable winners, and if that's not enough, to the merely possible.

When is a winner not a winner? Well, the nitpickers would say there's no such thing. Okay, when is an apparent winner not a winner? I have three cases: (1) It is ruffed. It's of no importance whether you can overruff or not. If you can, the winner lies in your trump. If that's in your long holding, you've probaly already counted it, but in any event, that ruffed card is not a winner. (2) You have no entry to it. (3) It's a redundant winner. If you cash it, you can only discard a winner in the other hand. You have, for instance, nine lovely cards that could be winners except that there are only eight tricks left on the hand.

The above table will lead you to some hands where I think a count of winners would have done declarer the service of steering him right.

What does a winner look like? After all, you can't count the armadillos in Texas if you thiink they look like aardvarks. Of course, given that a deuce or trey can be a winner as trump or a long card, a winnner can look like any card in the deck, which isn't very helpful to the eager student. If say it depends on the hand, we're still a little vague and not answering any questions, but I think we're moving a little closer to something we can latch on to.

Indeed, that's what the bottom line is all about, what cards are winners or likely to be winners -- with, of course a working knowledge of the scoring system for that game. That's what it's all about. The budding expert must learn to recognize when 9s, 8s, and 7s can be useful and when they have no value. He must, indeed, recognize when even treys and deuces might be worth a trick, and conversely, must recognize when jacks, queens and even an occasional king might not be worth anything.

So there's no such thing as recognizing winners outside the context of a hand, including knolwedge of the denomination, and no one can cover this subject in 5 easy pages. Indeed, if one could do so, the game wouldn't be complex enough to challenge us. You have to take it hand by hand and learn how winners were there for the taking as well as the times they were there for a little thinking and the times they werethere for a bit ofa risk. Capiche.

However, without any pretense that I could cover the topic thoroughly, I do feel some hands lend themselves to a discussion of winners overlooked, and to that end, I thought I'd introduce a few.