Playing a Hand in Spades

"Supposing that a club is being played, right. Now, we're looking for the queen, okay, so this club is being played. We don't necessarily have to find the queen of clubs in the deck. Here she is, okay. The first time a club is played, right, we don't know where the queen is, if a small club is played here the first thing I'm going to do, is I'm going to go up with the ace, cause it don't cost me anything. Then if my partner gets the lead and leads another club and this time the queen doesn't show up, I'm going to play the jack and hope that the queen is over here. This again is if I need tricks, this is when you're trying to manufacture tricks. So, a finesse is an attempt to win a trick of higher rank with a card of lower rank. In this case, I'm trying to win the trick with a jack, that's lower than the queen and if the queen's here, I'm rewarded and wind up making extra tricks. Finesses again are all sizes and shapes but the most common ones are the ace-queen small or the ace-queen-ten combinations or they're the king-jack ten or ace-jack-ten. Now, we also have the final one which I'll show you is the ace-jack-ten combination. Here you're missing two key cards. Well, you have a seventy-five percent probability of picking one of them up because if the king-queen are here and he chooses to play low, then you're going to get the ten. Now, most good players will split this, now, you're going to take one with the ace and now your jack can push out the queen and now you get two tricks. The only way that you get really hosed on this is if they're both over here and there's nothing you could have done about that. How can the suit be split? Well, they can be here, they can be here or they can be split either way. And there's a seventy-five percent probability that you'll take two tricks. There's a zero percent probability that you'll take all three tricks unless one of them comes out singleton because somebody's going to take them. What's the proper play here? Club lead, club lead. Say he plays small, he wins the king right. He can't return the suit, because if he returns the suit you're going to get the free ride here. So, again you have maximized the potential of winning tricks by using finessing the technique."