The Complete Auction Player Author:Florence Irwin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III (Specially recommended to all players, even excellent ones.) THE RAISE When your partner bids in a suit that fits your hand, when you ha... more »ve help for him, and when you hold no better game-going bid yourself, you raise your partner's bid if it becomes necessary, -- and sometimes even if it doesn't. This unnecessary (or "preemptive") raise will be described in a later chapter. In this, we will confine ourselves to the standard raise. To raise your partner's bid in any de- dared trump, you must hold two things: 1st. A "trick." 2nd. A "raiser." "Tricks" consist of three things, and "raisers" of five, -- those same three and two additional ones. In other words, there are three sorts of "tricks" and five sorts of "raisers.' Tricks are: 1st. Guarded trump-honours. Or, 2nd. Side-aces. Or, 3rd. Side-kings, guarded. One of these three things must be found in your hand and deducted from it before you look for your raiser. And raisers are: 1st. Guarded trump-honours. Or, 2nd. Side-aces. Or, 3rd. Side-kings, guarded. Or, 4th. Side-singletons. Or, 5/A. Blank suits. A plain singleton is one raiser. A singleton ace is two raisers, because you will lose no round of that suit. You will take the first round with your ace, and will ruff every subsequent round. A blank suit is also two raisers. It is, of course, necessary in both these cases that you have some trumps with which to take ruffs; otherwise, your singleton, or your blank suit will be valueless. And, in addition, your trick and your first raiser must lie in different suits. In other words, you never may raise on one suit alone; not even if it be trumps. Nothing lower than a side-king ever counts, either as a trick or a raiser. Queens don't count, no matter how w...« less