HOW TO COUNT WINNERS AND LOSERS
Some people recommend coutning winners in No Trump and Losers in a suit contract BUT this is WRONG
You should do both in all contracts
WINNERS
When the dummy goes down we must count winners to ascertain how many more tricks we need to find
WINNERS ARE DEFINITE TRICKS without any qualification
If we look at the following card combinations we can see how the winners works :-
AQ3 opposite K54 is 3 winners
AQ3 opposite K542 is still only 3 winners
KQJ109 opposite 876 is no winners YET (even if its trumps)
AKQ765 opposite 8432 is 6 winners (even if suit breaks 30)
AKQ765 opposite 843 is 3 winners (suit might break 40)
(One counts winners to see how much work there is to be done)
LOSERS
The people who only count losers in a Suit Contract, which is incorrect, will not be able to determine who to keep off lead in a No Trump contract- that why you should also count losers.
With losers one can be "optimistic".
No suit can have more than 3 losers as we now assume that suits will break!!
If a suit has less cards then it has less winners since we can trump in immediately when we run out of a suit.
These holdings in the NON TRUMP suits demonstrate how we count losers :-
KQJ10 opposite 543 is 1 loser
A2 opposite 543 is 1 loser
432 opposite 65 is 2 losers
A32 opposite 5 is 0 losers
KQ opposite 5 is 1 loser
(One counts losers to see how to play the hand carefully and how to work out if some of the losers can be dumped on winners in other suits, also counting losers sometimes pinpoints a weakness that might not easily have been spotted when counting the winners in the first place!!)
Now let us see how all this relates to the following hand : -
South gets to 4ª after a transfer sequence and West leads the ♦Q
North
ª KQJ43
© 7
West ¨ KQJ10 East
ª 87 § 765 ª A65
© 10954 © J862
¨ A82 South ¨ 764
§ QJ102 ª 1092 § K84
© AKQ3
¨ 953
§ A93
Counting our winners initially we have :-
1 Club and 3 Hearts ONLY
We therefore need 6 more , which will eventually come from the trumps and Diamonds.
Counting losers initially we have 1Spade, 1 Diamond and 2 Clubs.
We therefore have to avoid the club losers which need to be dumped on the 3 winning Hearts.
What pitfall could occur here?
If we had counted all our spades as winners initially we would draw trumps. The opponents get in and quickly cash 2 club winners. Now that we have counted correctly, we know as we do not have control of the trump suit, that we need to dump the club losers immediately before touching trumps. This hand is fairly easy BUT the problems that might occur are highlighted by counting the winners and losers correctly.
Play off three rounds of Hearts dumping the Clubs and now 11 tricks should be easy peasy !!