Count Your Winners -- Count Your Sluffs

	A K Q J 10
	8 7 5 4
	------
	K J 10 6
9 6 2		8 7 4 3
6		J 10 9
A Q 10 7		K J 8 6 3 2
Q 9 8 5 2		------
	5
	A K Q 3 2
	9 5 4	Contract: 6 hearts
	A 7 4 3	Opening lead: A of diamonds

If West finds a club opening lead, there's not much you can do about that. Below average -- 28% -- for a little slam well bid and made. How do you like that! But if West doesn't find that club lead, then the simplest of counting would show declarer that he's got 13 winners, barring a 4-0 split in hearts, which won't be something he can do anything about and which, in fact, he does not have.

Opening lead the A of diamonds ruffed in dummy, and now let's count. It's tolerable here to count after playing to trick one, since there's hardly any choice in the matter. And if we count, we find we have five spade winners, two clubs and six hearts. Columnists tend to say five hearts in the closed hand and a ruff, but I prefer to name that ruff a heart winner. And that adds up to 13. So let's get out the trump.

One lead to the A of hearts assures us that we don't have that miserable break and that we can continue drawing trump, then running out 13 winners. (If hearts did split 4-0, we would want to take one more diamond ruff with the expectation that we can get two spade leads through, sluffing the last diamond in the closed hand before surrendering a trick to the fourth trump in someone's hand.)

There's another count a declarer might indulge in if the first wasn't enough, to wit: how many sluffs do we get on that spade suit? And the answer is that you get as many as the difference in length (if the suit runs, as here -- if you need a ruff or two, you get as many sluffs as the difference minus one for every time you must ruff). Anyway, we're talking about counting up to 13 and about subtracting 1 from 5, and if we've got four sluffs coming, and we're ruffing a diamond on that opening lead, we've got all we need. Draw trump and claim.

However. . . this was one of the most egregious cases of not pouncing on the drawing of trump imaginable. There was simply no reason not to. Nothing could hurt declarer except to have a winner ruffed. But several declarers rather lazily led a club before bothering to draw trump and missed that overtrick. One led a club at trick two! Another declarer took a better route at trick two in leading a trump -- so as to ruff another diamond! She already had 13 winners in the sack and knew hearts weren't splitting 4-0 and she went for a 14th? Of course we know she wasn't thinking of a 14th winner, but the play made it pretty evident that she hadn't counted up the 13 she did have; the ruff of a second diamond would only produce a redundant winner. The 10 of spades wouldn't be used, or if cashed, declarer might toss the A of clubs on it. But she still didn't feel safe, it would seem, for at trick 4, she led a club! To ruff a third diamond? Can't say.

Whooda thunk it. Clubs 5-0. But you don't hafta concern yourself with clubs. Your task is to line up your winners, and when you've got 'em, it behooves you either to cash 'em out or claim. So the score was a paltry 28% as mentioned. The penalty for missing an overtrick is directly proportionate to the ease in which it is garnered. Take a hand with an overtrick available only by a highly esoteric squeeze (or maybe a defender making an improbably bad play) and though that declarer might get 100%, the 20 or 25 declarers without an overtrick won't suffer much. But when, say, 80% of declarers in your contract are picking up an easily available overtrick and you don't, you can be sure that the penalty will be severe.