Count Winners, Count Losers

J 8 7
6
K 6 4 2
A K 9 8 2
9 6 5 2 ------
A K 10 8 5 4 3 2
10 7 3 A Q J 9 8 5
5 4 3 10 6
A K Q 10 4 3
Q J 9 7
------ Contract: 6 spades
Q J 7 Opening lead: anything

Here is another hand that lends itself to either a count of winners or of losers. It is one of the simplest of cases, indeed, just one trick off the simplest of hands where you merely cash out top winners. You can see six spades and five clubs at a glance, can you not? Oh, sure, if all five clubs lie with East, you can't pick up the suit, but you can't allow yourself to be bedevilled by such improbabilities. So one playing bridge for the first time in his life should pick up 11 tricks, while the veriest expert can't make more than 12.
On this hand you would count losers out of the closed hand. Now don't count diamond losers out of this hand and heart losers out of the other, for you're going to come up one trick shy if you do. You must account for all the cards in one hand or the other. We see that clubs are solid, we have no diamond losers, spades are solid, and we have to take a look at four hearts. One must be lost, two go on the club differential, which leaves us with one heart to go, and we see that it can be ruffed after losing the first round. So your first order of business (particularly after a trump lead) is to lose a heart and do it quickly. Then you ruff a heart, draw trump, cash the queen of clubs to see how the suit lies, and when everyone follows you claim.
This jibes with counting winners. We have an easy 11 as noted, and find we can generate a twelfth by ruffing in the short trump hand.
Only one person went down in slam here, which may sound like too isolated a case for a daily hand, but wait! That's not half the story. Of those in game, an additional five people were held to -- or should I say, held themselves to -- eleven tricks. So what? you might say. They made their contract, didn't they?
Yes, they made their contract with an overtrick -- for a matchpoint score of 7.14, while those in game making 12 tricks got 41.67. That's so what. It is a considerably greater disparity than even I would have expected, but that's what the record shows.
How did declarer go down in slam? Curiously, this declarer started out right, unlike most of them in game making 5. Opening lead a diamond, ruffed, lose a heart, ruff another diamond, ruff a heart. Can't knock that, can you? Declarer now only has to lead out trump, cash a club (to ascertain that they're not splitting badly) and claim. Instead he now ruffed a diamond! And ruffed another heart! Well, of course, he had fewer trump than West with that third ruff of a diamond and couldn't have made the hand with or without the second heart ruff.
He had the contract in his pocket, if he'd only seen that he had every card in the closed hand accounted for. As for those in game making only five, there was a sad refrain of ruffing the opening diamond lead, drawing trump in four rounds and . . well, you don't need to be told that declarer simply cashed 6 spades and five clubs. But wait. Here's one who got going on the right track.
He ruffs the opening diamond lead, loses a heart, gets a trump lead, ruffs a heart and now only needs to run spades, then clubs. But he too got sidetracked from seeing that he had no more losers in the closed hand (assuming clubs weren't going to split in a frightfully bad manner). He now ruffed a diamond and ruffed another heart! Since there had been only two diamond leads, he still could have recovered by leading a low club and drawing trump, but no he cashed dummy's top two clubs. Actually, he could still have made his contract, by the luck both of having established the high heart and the hand with trump holding the last club out!
He could still have led a low club and claimed. But he ruffed a diamond, giving himself one fewer trump than West, and now went down on the lead of the queen of hearts, which West ruffed.