Cover Cards
The concept of Cover Cards is useful to evaluate how many tricks can be taken when Partner has shown a long (6 cards or longer) suit. Examples would be pre-emptive opening bids, weak (or strong) jump overcalls or jump shifts, re-bidding a major suit, gambling 3N opening bid, etc. In these cases, where your support is 3 cards or fewer, the Losing Trick Count method of hand evaluation is inaccurate and should not be used. But the idea of Cover Cards is appropriate to judge whether to bid game or slam, or how high it is safe to bid as a sacrifice.
A cover card is any card in your hand which will likely "cover" one of Partner's losers. An Ace, King or Queen in Partner's long suit counts as a cover card. Outside Partner's suit, any Ace counts as one cover card, an AK combination as two cover cards, Kx is probably one cover card, etc. The technique is to estimate partner's losers, then count your likely cover cards and subtract that number from partner's losers. The result is the likely number of losing tricks in the hand. For example - partner opens a vulnerable 3H (showing a seven-card suit and a 6-loser hand). If you have 3 cover cards, you can bid 4H (6-3 = 3 losing tricks). If you have 5 cover cards, you should investigate slam. If you have 2 cover cards, you can safely bid 4H as a sacrifice, expecting to be down one where 4S by the opponents will likely make 4 or 5.
The method is fully and clearly described by Ron Klinger in his book " The Modern Losing Trick Count".
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