I’m not a hoarder, but… I’ve made Ikea furniture. There’s usually an extra piece or two. A screw, or an oddly shaped bit that doesn’t seem to show up in the manual. What do you do with this?

If you toss it in the trash, you will sit down at your newly constructed desk, pull out the first drawer and immediately have all three drawers follow it crashing to the ground. Holding on to the potential waste is a good luck charm.

Discarding as a defender starts out with a lot of spare parts, but eventually, cards start to look mighty useful and you still may have to throw them away. How can you separate the important pieces from the unimportant ones?

The most basic concept: throw away losers, keep winners. This one seems even too basic, but it’s very easy to get caught up in a deal and forget that holding on to a losing high card isn’t going to be as important as a lower ranking card that has been promoted.

Another key concept: if you are the one with four-cards in a suit, you are often the one protecting that suit. Sometimes this saying is simplified to, “keep length with the dummy”, because we can often see that dummy holds four cards and it’s our job to stay even with dummy. Sometimes we might know that declarer has a four-card suit from the auction and holding on to the same length as declarer can also be key.

Those two concepts are key for our discarding. Sometimes, we are stuck--this is what a squeeze feels like. Sometimes, we’ll guess wrong. However if we follow our precepts, we’ll have a chance.

Let’s take a look at this deal.

We are East and this is the auction

West	North	East	South
			2
Pass	2	Pass	2NT
Pass	4NT	Pass	6NT
All Pass

Vul:None Dlr: South	DUMMY 92 AQ92 K108 10632
LEAD Q		543 10876 Q43 K98

We don't have much information from the auction about declarer's shape. They have something close to 24 points to bid this way (After showing 22-24, they accepted a slam try). Partner leads the Q. We signal with the 3. Declarer wins the K. Declarer leads a low diamond to dummy's K with partner playing the 2. Now declarer plays the 10. You'd better think fast!. We should duck here. Maybe partner has Jx. Covering is likely to help declarer (as is thinking for a long time before making this play). When in doubt, "second hand should play low" is a good rule. Declarer plays the A (aren't you happy you ducked smoothly?) and partner discards the 8.

Whenever a player shows out of a suit, you should mentally picture the entire suit. Here, declarer started with six diamonds! Interesting. Declarer plays a third diamond which you win with your queen. Partner's second discard is the 6. We win and need to pause. What should we play next?

Declarer is going to take five diamond tricks, two spades (partner didn't lead the Q from AQJxx on this auction), and at least two hearts, plus whatever they can get in clubs. That's not 12 clear tricks, so there's not necessarily a rush. Can partner have the A? No! We started with five points, dummy started with 9, and declarer with 24ish.

Vul:None Dlr: South	92 AQ92 K108 10632
QJ1086 J53 2 Q754		543 10876 Q43 K98
	AK7 K4 AJ9765 AJ