Pattern Recognition 3: Find and Build Trick Sources

Bridge is all about taking tricks. Everything we've been doing so far has been geared towards taking as many tricks as possible. 

In the previous article we looked at setting up long suits, and how those suits often yielded many extra tricks. In this article will look at trick sources. These are suits, that aren't necessarily long at all, but they often need a little bit of nudging to set up several tricks. Very often we want to set up these trick sources before we do anything else at all. 

The exciting thing about this article, is it combines very nicely with the previous things we've learned (SUSS and RSID). We need to train ourselves to look for trick sources and then regularly set them up, irrespective of what type of hand it is. 

Lets take a look at what these trick sources look like.

Here spades are not particularly long in either hand, but they represent a juicy source of tricks. Two tricks ready to be set up, all we have to do is put the  ♠ K on the table, and we'll have our two set up tricks ready to go. 

Lets put this into the context of an entire hand. 

Example 1. Playing in 4♥ , you get the Q♦ lead.   

Whats the plan? Lets use our knowledge from the previous article on RSID. This is clearly a RSID hand, while dummy has a 5 card suit, there isn't enough strength there to set it up and enjoy it. So our plan is to ruff a diamond. What else is there? We have a really nice trick source in spades. If we can set those tricks up, we can probably do something very nice with the extra trick, can you see what we can do? We can pitch our losing club. 

So we win the diamond lead with the Ace, and table the  ♠K immediately. Can you see why it is a priority here?

Lets say instead of playing the ♠K immediately we delay, and play a diamond next. The opponents will win it and play back a club, exposing our club loser immediately. Now we are too late, we can't set up our trick source in time. If we play the ♠K now, the opponents will cash their club trick, before we have a chance to pitch our losing club on the spades we have set up.

That leads us to our general rule - Set up trick sources as a matter of priority.

Example 2

The opponents lead a trump against the tight contract of 4♦, how do you play?

Do you notice the trick source? Here spades are once again the trick source, except this time you are missing the Ace and the King. Not to worry, you have time to knock both of those cards out. Go after spades immediately, before taking any ruffs or doing anything else. The idea is that the trump in dummy might be your only entry, so you dont want to blow that entry (say by ruffing a heart), before you've set up your source of tricks. In actual fact on this hand, you likely will not need to take any ruffs at all in dummy. You will probably end up making 2 spades, 2 hearts, and 6 diamonds, for a total of 10 tricks. You will lose 2 spades and 1 club. 

In summary, typically a trick source is 3 or 4 semi solid cards in a suit, missing the ace, or even missing the ace king. Playing your trick source at your first opportunity will be correct far more often than not. 

Where to next

• -> Next: Pattern Recognition 4: Avoid Creating Extra Losers
• -> Related: Count Winners in No-Trump: Build a Trick Plan
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