Practice Hand 1 · Declarer Play · Deal 4 from Chapter 26
Eight cards, missing four honours. What do you do?
North · Dummy
10 HCP
South · Declarer
17 HCP
| West | North | East | South |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pass | Pass | Pass | 1♣ |
| Pass | 1♠ | Pass | 3♠ |
| Pass | 4♠ | Pass | Pass |
| Pass | — | — | — |
Solution
With eight cards in your trump suit and four missing honours (Q, J, 10, 9), playing for the drop is your best chance. Cashing your top cards forces the missing honours to fall together if trumps split 3-2 — the most common break.
The "Eight Ever, Nine Never" rule is for hands missing one honour — specifically the queen. With eight cards missing the queen, you finesse. With nine, you don't. That rule has nothing to do with this deal.
Here you're missing four honours, with no idea which opponent has which. There is no finesse position to take advantage of. Cashing top cards is mathematically safer than guessing.
If trumps split 3-2 (about 68% of the time), you'll lose at most one trump trick when you cash ♠A and ♠K. If they split 4-1 you may lose two, but a finesse wouldn't have helped anyway. Finessing risks establishing extra trump tricks for the opponents instead of taking them away.
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