Course 7 Defence (Both Systems)

Half the hands you play, you are defending. That single fact shapes a player’s results more than any convention, any opening system, any clever bidding gadget — and yet defence is the poor relation of bridge teaching, handed out in scraps and picked up by trial and error at the table. Welcome to Course 7: Defence, where the other half of your game finally catches up with the first.

More contracts are made than beaten simply because the defence never got out of first gear. Not through missed brilliance — through the ordinary failure to have a plan. This course gives you one.

What You Will Learn

Across four structured modules, each building on the last:

• Opening Leads: The only card you play blind. Choosing correctly against no-trumps and against suit contracts, the special demands of leading against a slam, when a trump lead is right, and the small number of situations where breaking the flat rules is the better bridge.
• Defensive Signals: The shared language of the defending partnership. Attitude, count and suit-preference; the Smith Peters, the modern signal that answers “persist or shift?”; and the discipline of discarding without giving the show away to declarer while you do it.
• Reading the Cards: Turning what you can see into what you actually know. The Three Counts every good defender runs on every hand, taking charge of the defence when you hold more information than partner does, and the everyday mechanics — second hand low, third hand high, covering honours, and getting out of the way when your honour is doing more harm than good.
• Outplaying Declarer: The tools that beat contracts other pairs let through. The defenders’ trump suit, the defensive duck, active versus passive defence, seeing an end-play coming while there is still time to escape it, and — for the sharpest hands — deception, honestly used and honestly resisted.

Defence is largely system-blind. A trump lead, a Smith Peters, a hold-up of the trump Ace all work identically whether you play Modern Acol or SAYC, so the lessons are written system-neutral and the forks are flagged only where the two genuinely differ. Signalling is treated throughout as a partnership agreement rather than part of either system — because that is what it actually is.

By the end of this course you will pause when dummy appears, run the counts before you play a card, and know what your partner is telling you rather than hoping. Half the hands are yours. Go and defend them properly.