How to Manage Your Spades in Hearts

Video Transcript

"This is by far in a way a perfect example of managing a suit and also the ability to count and remember which cards are out. Here you have a hand, it's not, I mean sometimes you don't always have ideal hands. Here you have only four spades. Now if you had five spades, if you had this suit. That would be great, life would be rosy, but you don't have that luxury here. If the suit is divided so that somebody else has four of them, then you may very well be in a lot of trouble but, you do have an option here and that is the other high spade besides that ace called the king. Let us say that this person here is on lead. One thing you don't want is this person to be on lead because, this person over here will get a free ride, but. Let us suppose this person on lead and they lead the jack of spades. Now this is after the pass or maybe after a keeper hand. What is this person to do here? He doesn't have the queen so he's not going to go up with the king because the probability since he pushed spades initially is that he's going to get hit with the queen, so he's going to duck, and you're not going to overtake it you would rather have him still on lead so you're going to throw the six on it right? Now he leads the ten, and up comes the eight, and here comes the four and you throw the nine on it. Now, what have you done here? You've eight low spades come out, other than the queen, king, or ace. Okay, here are four, here's eight right? Now, you get very lucky here because, he leads through and you get to blast it with the queen of spades, but let us say for the sake of argument that he had four spades and he leads the seven, and he plays the deuce, now you take the ace, and maybe he throws a heart. That's eleven spades that have been played. The only spade that's out is the king. So, now you can lead the queen, right into the king. That's called the spear play. Works with the ace, works with the queen. It means counting the suit, looking for the ace or king, when you hold the queen and if either one of them are out or you get the absolute count on the suit. Lead the queen, it's a spectacular play, and you spear, or nail the ace or king."