play one's cards right/well, to

Fig. to work or negotiate correctly and skillfully. If you play your cards right, you can get whatever you want. She didn't play her cards well, and she ended up with something less than what she wanted.

To make the most advantageous use of one’s opportunities. Card-playing was popular in England from the mid-sixteenth century on, and terms from card games soon began to be transferred to other activities. This one appeared in print in Samuel Foote’s The Englishman in Paris (1753): “If Lucinda plays her cards well, we have not much to fear.” Whist, the antecedent of modern bridge, involves, with each hand dealt and bid, a suit that is designated as “trumps” (unless no-trumps is bid). For that hand, trump cards outrank all others. From this we have to play a trump card, meaning to make a winning move. Charles Lamb, who wrote extensively about whist between 1820 and 1829 (for London Magazine), was among the first to transfer trumps to mean any winning advantage: “Martin, if dirt were trumps, what hands you would hold!”