Wolperts on Defense

3rd and low leads against suits are commonly played by advanced and expert players. They choose to use their spot cards to convey how many they have, rather than how good the suit is they are leading from. This class tells you everything you need to know to start playing 3rd and low leads against suit contracts.

Attitude signals are the first and most important part of defensive signalling. We give attitude signals on our partner’s lead and when we discard. This class teaches standard attitude signals. It discusses the importance of giving strong signals and how to react to those signals. We finish the class by playing some practice deals.

Count signals are the second priority signal. We give count when declarer or dummy leads a suit and we are following. We tell our partner if we have an even or odd number of cards. This class talks about how and when to give count and how the signals can be useful. There was a powerpoint malfunction and so this class is entirely produced on a whiteboard.

Suit Preference Signals are the third and final defensive signal. We use suit preference when we do not need attitude or count. This is the rarest but also potentially the most useful signal when it comes up. This class will explain the many different situations that suit preference can be useful.

Knowing when to cover an honor is an art form. The most important thing is to understand how it can help. This class discusses why we might need to cover an honor and discusses the thought process you should have to decide. After the discussion we do a wide variety of defensive practice hands which utilize the 3 types of defensive signals.

Discarding is one of the hardest parts of the game. On one hand, we use our discards to help our partner know where we have our strength. On the other hand we have to worry about what suits we need to keep to stop declarer. This class discusses how to navigate the incredibly difficult process of discarding. After the discussion we do a wide variety of defensive practice hands which utilize the 3 types of defensive signals.

Declarer is on a mission. The sooner we can identify declarer’s plan, the sooner we can start to foil it. This class discusses how to recognize what declarer is planning and how to stop them from achieving their goals. After the discussion we do a wide variety of defensive practice hands which utilize the 3 types of defensive signals.

Breaking new suits is typically not a good idea.  As we discussed in "End Plays and Frozen Suits", there are many suits that whoever leads them first are blowing a trick.  So our general philosophy is to make passive plays on defense.  Sometimes there is urgency for us to get our tricks set up and/or take our tricks.  Deciding whether an active or passive defense is required is one of the most important skills on defense.  This class will help you learn how to identify if there is urgency to cash our tricks or break a new suit, or if you should take a passive approach.  

We begin this class by discussing the concept of secondary signals.  These are signals we give when our primary signal has already been given or is obviously unnecessary.  

This lesson focusses on trick one against NT when declarer wins the trick in dummy.  We will talk about when attitude is no longer relevant and how to use count to solve some otherwise unsolvable problems.  By the end of this class, you will have seen many examples of how to "give count when dummy wins the Jack or lower".  We also spend some time talking about "remainder count" also known as present count or current count.