No-Trump Basics: Build Your Long Suit and Cash Winners
No-trump contracts can feel confusing at first. There are no trumps to rescue you, but then again the opponents do not have trumps to hurt you with either.
The good news: most no-trump hands can be played with one clear idea:
Build your long suit, then cash your winners.
What “build your long suit” means
In no-trump, your long suit is often your best source of extra tricks.
Building a long suit means:
- forcing out defenders’ high cards in that suit,
- then cashing your promoted small cards later.
So you are often willing to lose one or two tricks now to win several tricks later.
Why this is the core no-trump plan
Very often No Trump contracts are a race. One side is trying to set up their long suit and the other is trying to do the same. It's important that we are able to look at a hand and confidently say which our suit is our best source of tricks. The skill is pretty straight forward. Look at both hands and see which your longest suit is, hopefully you have a 5 or 6 card suit to crack into. Your eyes should gravitate towards that. Just noticing those long suits is the first big step to making more tricks.
Simple plan at trick one
When dummy comes down, ask:
Where, or in which suit, am I going to get my winners from? (Hint: not just your top winners like your Aces, but your suits that have potential to give you extra winners.)
The point in this article is to start recognising those sources of tricks. In future articles we will also talk about other ingredients, like entries. Entries are often the key to unlock the treasure.
Typical features of suits where extra winners come from
- Our long suits - the most likely characteristic. Your tricks typically are in your long suits.
- Our dense suits which are not yet tricks. For example KJ1087 opposite 954. Currently you have no certain tricks in there, but you have a lot of high cards that have not yet been put to work. Lets get them working.
- Honor sequences are very typical trick sources, for example KQJ10 opposite 874.
This overlaps slightly with side-suit honor sequence ideas, but here the focus is specifically your no-trump game plan: identify your trick source early, build it, then cash it in the right order.