How to Strip Your Hand of Risky Cards in Hearts

Video Transcript

"This is a play that we often call the grand exit or stripping the hand. Here's a hand after the pass which is a really nice hand except that really don't have a chance for the moon because there's no way they're going to let you get by with the deuce of hearts. Don't even think about it. Do you honestly think that the opponents are going to throw the whole heart suit on you and your deuce will be number thirteen? I don't think there's a layout of a hand where that works anyway, but this hand has an overall strategy and the strategy of this hand is going to be to remove the spades, remove the diamonds, remove the clubs, get on lead, a heart comes out, and then you exit the hand completely. Now let's say the deuce of clubs is led and it comes around to you know the jack or queen comes out, the jack queen come out together you can overtake them, but let's just say that the jack and queen don't come out then you win the ten or if the jack and queen do come out then you win the ace. The next order of attention, diamonds. You want to knock out the ace of diamonds. You don't want the ace of diamonds to be hanging around. You want to make sure that somebody can't throw you in with a diamond because they might have the ace and the deuce. So you keep pushing the diamonds until the ace comes out. Do you care if a heart comes out? Not really, just a little bit, because if a heart comes out and they start on the heart suit, you're going to be in a tough way, but that's pretty unlikely with only three, but it could happen. Now the spades, if the jack of spades comes out you will have the opportunity unless somebody has five spades to clean out four rounds of them. Now you're down to this position and it's easy. Queen and jack of clubs already been accounted for, two more rounds of clubs, ace of hearts, deuce of hearts, thank you to the lead, queen of spades welcome to anybody who wants it. So you've stripped the hand down of dangerous cards. If you don't have the queen of spades in your hand, you have to be more careful. Maybe driving spades is the only alternative. Maybe the hand was lost anyway, but if you don't make the effort, you will not get the result and look for low cards to get out of the hand at critical instances."