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)
“By the “mud-sill” theory it is assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible. According to that theory, a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be—all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly.... Free labor insists on universal education.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)