In my account of the Winning Trick Count in the preceding chapters I have sought to provide a balanced view of its limitations as well its strengths.

For example – I have pointed to my belief that, as well as being broadly irrelevant to the majority of no trump hands, evaluation procedures such as the Winning Trick Count have only a very limited role to play on those deals where you have a combined point count of around 26, or more, and usually an excellent prospect of bidding and making game.

In addition - and in contrast with much of the bridge literature - I have questioned the merit of seeking to make detailed adjustments to improve the accuracy of such hand evaluation. In support of this conclusion I have sought to show that some of the corrections, which are routinely proposed, fail to match up to the claims that are made for them.

On the other hand, as I also noted, this somewhat heretical judgement about the limited value of the kind of structured refinements which are a feature of most bridge-hand evaluation methods does not, of course, reduce the scope for the players themselves to seek to improve their forecast on those deals where the bidding and their own experience (or intuition) points clearly to the need to adjust the basic evaluation.

My view, however, is that each such case should be assessed on its merits and then corrected in a quite ad hoc way which seeks to reflect the shape and quality of that particular hand and such indications of unusual distributions as may have emerged during the auction.

Notwithstanding this cautionary note about the boundaries of bridge-hand evaluation procedures, my primary aim has, of course, been to demonstrate that the Winning Trick Count does provide the players with an outstandingly powerful assessment capability, and to that end a concluding summary of its main strengths is provided below:

For example, it has the important advantage that it can still be used when one of the partnership hands has less than three cards in the proposed trump suit.

Moreover, it has an unusually broad scope and it will provide you with an equally accurate forecast of the possible merits of competing in any auction where it is evident that your opponents hold the balance of strength.

But, in addition, itadds a completely new dimension to traditional bridge evaluation:

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-Firstly, by extending the conventional estimation procedure to provide precisely the same Total Trick Count as the Law of Total Tricks.

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-Secondly – and more importantly - by enabling the players to use such information as they usually have on the card distribution and respective strength of the hands to break down this Total Trick Count into a forecast of the number of tricks which each side is likely to make if they were to play in their best contract.

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Another salient feature of the basic version of the Winning Trick Count(your joint holding of honour cards added to your combined holding of trumps minus six) is the ease and speed with which an evaluation can be made for both pairs of hands on any exposed deal.

For instance, as well as enabling me to demonstrate the accuracy of the evaluation procedure as measured against the results of an unusually large number of real boards it also allowed me to undertake a detailed comparison of these Winning Trick Count estimates with those of the Losing Trick Count for over 500 contracts, as shown in the table below:

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I noted that this version of the evaluation procedureis particularly suitable for that large number of auctions where you can judge that you have a suit fit and where yourpartner’s bidding - or that of the opposition - allows you to make an estimate of your combined point count.

Following which, if we assume that three points correspond on average to one honour-card trick - and with the proviso that you first deduct two points to allow for the average holding of two knaves which you do not want to include in your estimation of winners - the number of point-count tricks that you can expect to make if you play in a suit contract with a typical combined holding somewhere in the range of 10 – 30 points is:

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Given, however, that some players would undoubtedly prefer an even easier evaluation procedure when they are considering what to bid, I went on to define the Point-Count Balance variant which is just as precise but which is even simpler to use. 

I added that the key feature, which distinguishes this very effective bidding aid procedure, is that it is based on the relative strength, or weakness, of the partnership point count and I went on to show that with a typical combined holding somewhere in the range of 10 – 30 points the balance of such point count tricks will be:

Your Total Point Count	Your expected balance of Point-Count Tricks
28 29 30	3
25 26 27	2
22 23 24	1
19 20 21	0
16 17 18	-1
13 14 15	-2
10 11 12	-3

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You then simply need to add this balance of point count tricksto your estimate of our combined holding of trumps to complete this exceptionally uncomplicated assessment of the number of tricks you can expect to make.

The Point-Count Balance procedure also makes it easy for you to estimate your opponents’ trick-taking prospects in any competitive auction where you are able to judge the quality of their prospective trump fit.

This results from the simple fact that if you have more than the average number of points and hence a positive point-count balance, your opponents must have an identical negative point-count balance; and vice versa

It follows that you simply need to add their balance of point-count tricks to your estimate of the length of their trump suit and you know how many tricks they are likely to make.

And by the same token, you can, of course, easily form a view of your own balance of point-counttricks in those auctions where the opposition bidding enablesyou to make an estimate of their point strength.

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In conclusion, I believe that when taken together, these various strengths and advantages of the Winning Trick Count show clearly that it can provide bridge players with a powerful and quite outstandingly accurate evaluation capability.

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A capability, moreover:

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-Which will not interfere with their normal bidding procedures

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-Which is singularly easy to use at the bridge table

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-And one, which they will find to be particularly effective in competitive bidding situations, and often at an early stage of the auction.

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QED