In the partnership card game contract bridge, a suit combination is a specific set of cards of a particular suit held in declarer's and dummy's hands. While the ranks of the remaining cards held in the opposing hands can be deduced immediately, their location is uncertain. A suit combination allows for all possible lies of these remaining cards in those hands.
The term is also used for the sequence of plays from the declarer and dummy hands, conditional on intervening plays by the opponents; in other words, declarer's plan or strategy of play given his holdings and his goal for the number of tricks to be taken.
In addition to understanding the possible initial combinations and probabilities for the location of the opponents's cards in a suit, declarer can further inform himself from the bidding, the opening lead and by the play of cards to each trick in establishing, executing and amending his plan.
Read more about Suit Combination: Examples, Representation, Simplified Setting, Deriving Optimum Suit Plays, Exploiting Defensive Errors, Improved Computer Analysis, Goal Setting, Mixed Strategies
Famous quotes containing the words suit and/or combination:
“Calm is the morn without a sound,
Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
And only through the faded leaf
The chestnut pattering to the ground:”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)