Hi ,

I'm really happy to welcome back Prakash Paranjape for another video. His last video, in which he guided us to a natural understanding of squeeze plays, was wonderfully received. Thank you to everyone who wrote in or left a comment on the Youtube page.

In this follow-up video, Prakash responds to a fantastic question sent in by a viewer about when it is or isn't safe to discard the fifth card of a suit... Enjoy!

Play Video

Discards are often tricky, especially when an opponent is playing out a long suit and we have to make lots of them. We may look at a suit such as T432 and think we have no tricks there so we can easily discard the 2. However, that might let the contract through! What if declarer had 4 and now wins with the 5 on the 4th round?

On the other hand, if we hold onto our long suit, we won’t have as much room in our hand for keeping other suits. We might give a trick away that way too!

Do we need to be psychic to get this right? It would certainly help but we can get this right more often than not by paying attention to all the information we have.

Watch the video to see how Prakash guides us to weigh all our options and then play through the hand from all four seats here:

♠♥♦♣

Prakash Paranjape has won multiple bridge championships in India and wrote the bridge column for the Times of India for over twenty years.

Thank you for sending in the question, Milland!

Your partner in learning,

Bajir

♠♥♦♣

Related links:

• Link to this Youtube video: https://youtu.be/uWmK8yTULCI
• Replay the previous video with Prakash: https://youtu.be/wOYrhkPLbnQ