How Bridge Master defends Back to the index On opening lead the defense follows standard defensive conventions: - The King is led if both the Ace and King of a suit are held (unless doubleton). - The defense leads fourth best from a broken holding. - From a sequence (except Ace-King-..) or interior sequence, he highest card of the sequence is led; thus, the King is led from K-Q-(J)-..., and the Jack is led from K-J-10-...). - The defense leads low from a three-card holding without an honor sequence and the high card from a doubleton. After the first trick, East and West generally do not signal each other on defense. Therefore the user should be cautious when drawing inferences, pertaining to count or the location of high cards, that may be suggested by the defensive carding. The defense has only one objective - to defeat the contract. Bridge Master does not concern itself with extra undertricks. As soon as the program discovers a way to defeat the contract, it will use that method. Sometimes there will be a simpler or more elegant defense available that would also defeat the contract. When defending, Bridge Master is programmed to defeat the contract if the user misplays the deal. That is, there is one correct or best line of play per deal. If the user does not play the deal in the correct manner, the East and West cards will be arranged so that the user will go down in his contract. Since there are many different ways to misplay a deal, the East and West cards will be changed appropriately. For example, if the deal contains a a two-way finesse for a Queen, both defenders will hold that card if the correct line of play demands not taking the finesse. Bridge Master will never re-arrange the defenders' cards in such a way that the best line of play would fail. Being aware of this fact can make it easier for the user to solve a problem with which he is having trouble. He should try to modify his line of play to cope with the distribution that defeated him the last time. The correct line of play will guard against that distribution. Back to the index