Assuming declarer is logical in their play can help us determine what declarer holds and help us best defend the hand!

As a defender, asking the opponents questions about the inferences available from the auction (exactly what declarer has shown or denied) is an important part of properly visualizing declarer's hand!

Most bridge players are well trained to make a plan about winners or losers as declarer, but we should be making a similar plan when we are defending!   

Suit Preference signals are some of the most valuable signals for the defense.  This week we look at how they work and when to make use of them. 

Smith Echo is a valuable tool for defending notrump contracts.  This week we look at how to use it!

We examine a special agreement for opening leads this week -- Ace or Queen asking for an Attitude signal and King asking for a Count signal.

This week we discuss how to handle the defense when we make an opening lead and Qxx or longer hits in the dummy.

This week we turn our discussion to a common and important part of Defense -- Leads in Partner's Suit.  We will focus on the details of these specific situations.

This week we continue with our defense discussion but we turn our attention to listening to the auction and collecting information in general.   We'll combine this with the topics we've been discussing to help provide an overall view of what makes for excellent defense.

This week we continue our focus on Defense and look at some fundamentals of card combinations.  We discuss what we should lead from many different holdings (given no information from the auction.)  

The month we continue our defense discussion.   This week we focus on Partnership Defense Philosophies.  These are important generic understandings to have with partner about the way we defend a hand!

This week our focus is on Defensive Tools in the middle of the hand.   Our goal is to familiarize ourselves with the options available on a given hand and then learn to make good choices of how to attack the Declarer.  

This week our focus is on one of the large concepts of Defense.  Specifically, we discuss the level of aggression (active vs. passive defense) we should take on a hand.

Now that we have laid out some basic signaling agreements with partner, we want to focus on another important part of defensive communication - Discards.   Reading partner's discards and choosing our discards carefully are important parts of effective communication. 

This month we begin work on the hardest part of the game of bridge - Defense.   It seems like Defense should be easy (it is two of us against one Declarer.)  But unfortunately, working together with Partner is often a challenge.   We will explore some agreements and discussions that are important to have with Partner.