Honours in Bridge

The one bonus in bridge you get purely for being dealt it.

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What Honours Are Worth#

Honours are a bonus for holding the top cards of the trump suit — or all four aces at no trumps — in a single hand. There are three payments and no others:

The four aces only pay at no trumps, because at no trumps there is no trump suit to hold honours in. In a suit contract, four aces are worth nothing as honours.

Every honour payment goes above the line.

They Must Be in One Hand#

This is the rule that costs people points, so it is worth stating twice: honours are counted per hand, never per partnership.

If you hold A K of trumps and your partner holds Q J, your side has four of the top five trumps between you and scores nothing. The same four cards in one hand would be 100. There is no partial credit, and no way to combine two hands.

It follows that honours are pure luck. Nothing in the bidding or the play can make them happen, and no skill is being rewarded — which is precisely why duplicate bridge abolished them and rubber bridge kept them.

Who Scores Them, and When#

The side holding the honours scores them. That is the whole test. It does not matter:

• whether that side declared or defended;
• whether the contract made or went down;
• how many tricks anybody took.

So a defender sitting with A K Q J of the declarer's trump suit scores 100 for his side while beating the contract, and collects the penalty as well. Declarer can go four down doubled and still be owed 150 for the five trump honours in hand.

The honours are determined by the trump suit of the final contract, so nothing can be counted until the auction is over.

Honours Never Count Towards Game#

Honours are always above the line. They add to your final total and they do nothing else — they cannot turn a part-score into a game, they cannot make you vulnerable, and they cannot win a rubber.

This is a common misreading of a pad. A hand that shows 120 for the honours and the overtricks in the right-hand column has still only banked whatever trick score sits below the line. If you are 60 below and you score 150 for honours, you are still 60 below.

The distinction is the whole point of the line, and it is covered properly in the scoring chapter.

When Honours Change a Decision#

Rarely, but not never. Because the payment attaches to the trump suit of the final contract, holding four or five top cards in a suit is a quiet argument for playing there rather than somewhere else of equal merit.

With A K Q J x of hearts and a choice between 4♥ and 3NT on otherwise balanced evidence, 4♥ is worth an extra 100 before a card is played. That is a third of a part-score, from nothing. It is not a reason to bid a worse contract — 100 above the line does not compare with a game — but between two contracts you rate as equal, it breaks the tie.

The other place they bite is the running total. Over a long session, honours are a meaningful slice of the final margin, and they are the reason a player who has had the worse of the cards can still be ahead on points.

Claiming Them#

At a real table, honours are claimed by the player who held them, and the polite moment is at the end of the hand when the score is being written up. An unclaimed honour is generally lost once the next hand is dealt.

In Rase's robot game the app checks all four hands after every deal and awards honours automatically, naming the seat that held them, so nothing is ever missed. On the Live Scorepad — and in the score calculator — you enter them yourself, because the app cannot see the cards in a game played with real ones.