INTRODUCTION

My aim in the account, which follows, is to propose the Winning Trick Count as a novel, powerful and unique bridge-hand evaluation procedure.

- Novel, because it offers the choice of basing the evaluation quite simply on the joint holding of honour cards and trumps as defined in the Preface above; or even more simply when playing the hand at the bridge table, on the partnership combined point count and the expected quality of the trump fit.

- Powerful, despite its simplicity and its accuracy, because it has a significantly broader scope than conventional procedures such as the Losing Trick Count.

- Unique, because it adds a completely new dimension to conventional bridge-hand evaluation, by providing precisely the same Total Trick Count as the Law of Total Tricks.

The detailed account of these far-reaching claims, which are supported by an extensive analysis of several hundred real deals, is broken down into three distinct sections, as outlined below:

On the other hand, those readers who are not particularly interested in such a detailed commentary on bridge-evaluation, but who would nevertheless welcome an effective and quite unusually simple bidding aid, should just go directly to the description of the Point-Count Balance variant of the Winning Trick Count in Chapter 5.

In which case, they will see that the modified and somewhat unorthodox evaluation procedure which is described there is just as precise and broad ranging as the basic Winning Trick Count. They will also see that it is particularly suited to that substantial fraction of bridge players who routinely use their point count as an initial measure of their hand strength since, on any deal where they are able to identify a prospective trump fit, it provides them with an immediate forecast of their partnership trick-taking prospects (and in many competitive auctions, those of their opponents too!).

___________________.

PART 1 – THE WINNING TRICK COUNT (WTC). 

This section, which covers Chapters 1 – 6, describes the main features of the Winning Trick Count, but it does so without any detailed consideration of the technicalities of such hand assessment.

Instead,it is intended to show how the honour-card and point-count variants of this unusually simple measure of partnership strength can provide bridge players with an accurate forecast, both of their own trick-taking prospects and those of their opponents, on a wide variety of deals.

The standard version of the Winning Trick Count, which is based on the partnership holding of honour cards and trumps, is characterised by the ease and speed with which an evaluation can be made for both pairs of hands on any exposed deal by just glancing at the card distribution. In turn, this means that it is extremely simple to check the accuracy of the estimates against the results of real boards, or to compare such Winning Trick forecasts with those of more conventional procedures

However, the point-count versions, which are then described, have the important advantage that they are very much easier to use at the bridge table, where of course, you don’t enjoy the luxury of such an overview of the entire deal. They are equally precise and broad ranging and – as noted above – it is judged that the Point-Count Balance variant which is proposed in Chapter 5 will provide a very simple and effective bidding aid for those players who routinely use their point count as an initial measure of hand strength.

___________________

PART 2 – THE ACCURACY AND SCOPE OF THE WINNING TRICK COUNT. 

Insofar as the Winning Trick Count is based on a quite positive assessment of hand quality,it is clearly irreconcilable with Dudley Courtney’s assertion, in the first English Edition of his Losing Trick Count in 1935, that: ‘There is only one single method of measurement by which a hand can be truly pictured. That is when you count its losing tricks’.

But of course, the reality is that there is no single certain method of measurement. Instead there is a range of bridge-hand assessment methods that are currently in use. Moreover, they all have considerable merit and they all provide a correct estimation of the trick-taking potential on a significant fraction of deals. If they did not they would not have survived.

And by the same token, my own claim is not that the Winning Trick Count is infallible - indeed I shall describe its limitations at some length.But rather, as I shall seek to demonstrate, that, it is significantly more precise and much more widely applicable than the more conventional evaluation procedures on a broad range of hands.

To that end, this section, which covers Chapters 7 –9, is much more concerned with the technicalities of bridge-hand assessment than PART 1. It includes a comparison of the accuracy of both the Honour Card and the Point Count versions of the Winning Trick Count with that of the Losing Trick Count for over 500 suit contracts. As can be seen from the summary of the results in the table below, this extensive exercise showed that the Winning Trick forecasts were within one trick of the right result over 90% of the time, whereas the Losing Trick score - although still impressive - was nearer to 80%.

 

EVALUATION PROCEDURE	NUMBER OF CONTRACTS	ESTIMATE CORRECT   No. %		ESTIMATE CORRECT WITHIN +/- ONE TRICK No. %
Winning Trick Count (Honours)	545	273	50	488	90
Winning Trick Count (Points)	545	288	53	502	92
Losing Trick Count	430	173	40	359	83

Although this Winning Trick performance is excellent by any standards, the analysis also shows that itwas, nevertheless, incorrect by one trick on almost half of the contracts and that it was out by two tricks or more on around 10%.

In the light of this observation, the section then goes on to a detailed consideration of the prospects of improving the score for those hands where the evaluation procedurefails to provide an accurate forecast of the trick-taking prospects 

This exercise provides a measure of the extent to which the laws of probability and the randomness of card distribution establish an inevitable and quite significant limit to the accuracy of such hand assessment.

In addition, however, it then points to a much more cautious view about the merit of seeking to use structured corrections and adjustments to improve the success of such hand evaluation than that of most other commentaries on the subject.

______________________

PART 3 – CONCLUSIONS.

This section provides a résumé of the main featuresof the Winning Trick evaluationprocedure, with some final comments and conclusions.