Espositori

When some one orders up (or names) trump in the first round, the dealer picks up the exposed card on top of the grave and then must make hi (or her) first strategy decision:  what to discard.

Let's step through some fairly obvious decisions in this regard, and then get to some more common ones.

1.  Don't Discard Trump! 

Gosh, I hope that was obvious! In the extremely unlikely situation that you now have 6 trump in your hand, you will be forgiven for discarding your lowest trump card in that situation.

2.   Don't Discard the Left Bower by Mistake!

A common beginner mistake is to forget about the left bower situation, and discard the jack of the suit that is the same color as trump.  DON'T DO THAT! It would be bad. 

OK, let's get into some real meat here. 

Generally speaking, you are trying to take tricks.  To take tricks in Euchre you need high cards (Aces and Kings) or Trump.  In order to use your trump, you cannot have any cards of the suit that is led.  So - basically speaking - you are trying to do two things with your discard:

1. Get rid of low cards
2. Void your hand of a suit so that you can play trump when that suit is led (often called short suiting) 

When these two events can be married in one discard, life is simple and easy.

You dealt yourself a nice Clubs hand, but you were ordered up on that .  Poop happens.  Fortunately in this case your discard is easy.  All the hearts are keepers as that is trump.  The clear choice here is the .  Getting rid of it allows you to void (short) your hand of Diamonds so that when Diamonds are played you will be able to use your trump.

Let's look at an example that is a bit tougher:

Once again you are ordered up on the , but this time it's looking somewhat better for you.  You're going to end up with three trump, so you're going to have an impact on the hand.  What, though, do you discard to have the best impact?

That is your lowest non-trump.  Keeping the kings makes some sense.  However, a better move here is to discard the .  Let's look at why.

In order for your  to take a trick the has to be one of the three cards in the grave.  As there are 18 cards in the deck that you do not know at this time, this leaves a 3/18 or 1/6 chance that the is buried.  Meaning there is a 5/6 chance its in someone else's hand.  Not too good.

You are better off in this situation discarding the  so that you can now trump in on Clubs or Diamonds, getting the most mileage out of the small trump that you have.

You will not be correct 100% of the time when there is some question as to which card to discard, but if you play the odds, you will be right often enough to be a long term winner at euchre.