Lesh18, on 2012-May-03, 18:17, said:
And let's say that the declarer is the one who bid 4♠ thus spades are trump suit.
1) How many losers can a declarer count?
2) Will he count from his prespective? Or will change prospectives between the dummy to come to a lowest number possible?
The problem is that I am not very confident in counting losers; could you, please, show me on this exaple how to properly do it?
When counting losers, the typical way to do it is pick a "master hand", and count losers in that hand only. This is usually the hand with *longer* trumps, therefore north on this hand. If both hands are equal length trumps, you typically pick the hand with better, side suits that can be established. Exceptions to counting in this fashion are hands that lend themselves to crossruffing, and "dummy reversals".
So for this hand, you look at North count:
1. 0 losers in spades (you have all the top honors since S has Q)
2. 3 losers in hearts. (North has 4 possible losers, but the ace in south will cover one of them)
3. no loser in diamonds ( 1 loser, covered by ace in south)
4. 2 club losers (ace is winner, 2 small cards)
So there are 5 possible losers. You can only afford 3, therefore how to get rid of them? The most obvious way is to ruff the losing hearts with south. If you can ruff two of your heart losers away, then the contract is made. So the plan should be, if the opps didn't lead trumps, to play ace and a heart at once, and maneuver to ruff one heart low, and the 2nd heart with the Q if it's possible to be overruffed (you can still pick up the trumps since you have AKJT).
There are additional chances in the club suit; one of your opponents could have a doubleton honor, for example. If west has it, you can lead j and let it ride if not covered, and drop the honor later. If East has it, you can lead low toward the board, and if East pops finesse west later. Or if he ducks, drop it. But generally you are going to resort to this only if the opps led a trump on the go, and again when in with the heart, preventing you from ruffing twice in hearts.
Once you have this plan, you can see that it would be a mistake to commence drawing trumps yourself; you need the trumps to ruff hearts twice in South.
An alternative to counting losers (or really, should be done *in addition to*), is counting winners. Here you'd count 5 spade winners, 3 side aces, for 8 tricks. You need to generate two more winners, how to do it? Again, the answer is ruffing hearts in South.
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3) Do you always assume, as long as there is a 8-card trump fit, that there are no losers in the trump suit?
Of course not. here there are no trump losers because you have AKQJT between the hands. If say the Q or K were missing, that's 1 additional *possible* loser. If the ace was missing, it's a *sure* loser.
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