How to Play · Lesson 8 of 10

Defensive Play

Practice the left bower, strategic throw-offs, and protecting your most powerful trump.

Your Goal on Defense

When the opponents call trump, your team is on defense. To euchre them you need 3 or more tricks — they score nothing and you score 2 points.

Even winning just 1 trick is valuable: it prevents a march (all 5 tricks), limiting them to 1 point instead of 2.

Conserve Your Trump

The callers want to lead trump early to strip it from your hands. Resist giving it up cheaply.

When following a trump lead you cannot win, use your lowest trump to save stronger ones.
When your partner has a good chance of winning a trick with a non-trump card, do not trump in — you waste a trump card your team needs to take a later trick and gain nothing in the process. If you think your partner already has it, it's best to throw an off-suit to void yourself in that suit to open another opportunity to trump in if it's led later.
Trumping in early in the hand is usually safest because opponents haven't had a chance to void suits yet.

Use trump wisely to try to trump into an off-suit lead when your partner doesn't already control the trick.

Lead Off-Suit Aces

On defense, leading an Ace in a non-trump suit is usually your safest opening. You have a great chance of taking the trick without using trump.

Leading trump is usually wrong on defense — it pulls trump from your own partner and the callers typically have the most powerful trump so you wind up losing the trick anyway.
Short suits (singletons or doubletons) are useful to lead out from - once you run out of a suit, you can trump in later if that suit is led back.

Protected Left Bower

A special situation comes up when you are on defense and you hold a protected left bower (the left bower with another trump). When you have this, and the right bower is led out by the opponent, you can throw the lower trump card on that trick and then you hold the highest trump left in the hand to block them from taking all the tricks.

You should try to preserve the protected left until your team takes at least one trick or until you see the right bower come out. Trumping a trick before either of those situations and leaving your left bower alone in your hand can risk losing your opportunity to stop a march from the calling team if they still hold the right bower.
Allow your partner to try to take other tricks in the meantime while you preserve this defensive position.

The protected left is a special defensive opportunity to prevent the other team from taking all the tricks as long as you are patient with playing it at the right time.

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