The easiest step in learning to play bridge is counting high-card points. It's also one of the first skills that advancing players seek to improve. Experience is the best teacher, but many find they can speed up the process by learning more about other ways to measure a hand’s strength.
Almost all beginners start with the traditional 4321 point-count. Although simple, it’s not perfectly accurate because it undervalues aces and tens and overvalues queens and jacks. To remedy this, bidding theorists have developed a number of other approaches for judging honor strength.
Most of these counting methods apply mainly to decisions about opening bids, when you don’t yet have information about possible trump fits. Here are some of the ideas that have been proposed as improvements to the standard point-counting guidelines:
Fractional points. To better reflect the relative power of high honors, this counting system adjusts the point values for four of the top five cards in a suit. Add up your points with the 4321 scale, then add ½ point for each ace and ¼ point for each ten. Subtract ½ point for each queen and ¾ point for each jack.
Honor wastage. It doesn’t take much playing experience to realize that honors have more trick-taking potential if they’re in long suits instead of short suits. To give this a numerical value, subtract one point for any suit that has one or more honors but no low cards. That includes singleton honors, doubletons such as KQ and QJ and even 3-card holdings (AKQ and KQJ).
Loser count. The Losing Trick Count is usually used to estimate your combined strength after you find a fit, but this method uses a version of it to evaluate opening bids. Instead of counting points for each honor in your hand, you count the number of missing honors.
To do this, count one loser for each missing ace, king and queen in suits of 3+ cards. In shorter suits, count only missing aces and/or kings. This is adjusted for the location of queens – AQ doubleton is ½ a loser, a queen with no other honors (Qxx) is 2.5 losers.
The theory is that you need seven or fewer losers to open the bidding. This can be a helpful test, especially if your partnership plays sound opening bids, but it’s difficult to make it work as your only evaluation method. You need to adjust “up” for 8-loser hands that have two or more quick tricks ( ♠A52 ♥QJ76 ♦A76 ♣K87 ) and down for 7-loser hands that have sub-minimum high-card strength ( ♠Void ♥QJ4 ♦J98543 ♣K763 ).
The loser count is most effective when evaluating marginal hands of 10 to 12 points. An 8-loser hand such as ♠QJ72 ♥KQ ♦J106 ♣KJ73 isn't the most attractive opening bid, but passing is so “anti-field” that the loser count shouldn’t be your only test. With 13 points, all other players will open this hand, and unless you're trying for an unusual result, you should, too.
Kaplan-Rubens (KnR) Evaluation. This is an expert-level assessment developed by Edgar Kaplan and Jeff Rubens. The math is so complex that only a savant would be able to do the computations at the table, but it can offer interesting insights if you want to test your decisions later. Keep in mind that it doesn’t consider strategy or system and it tends to significantly downgrade balanced, ace-poor hands (it evaluates the 13-count above as only 10.15 points).
The tool has a handy web interface that allows you to type in a hand and get a quick answer. To try it, do a web search using the terms "bridge" and "Knr”.
Distribution points? Beginners are advised to not count distribution points until a trump fit is found. Some lesson programs, however, teach the concept of "length points” – one point for each extra card in suits longer than four cards – and recommend adding these to high-card points when considering an opening bid. Other advanced counting schemes (including the KnR tool) also factor the value of long suits into their calculations.
We’ll look at these and other methods for determining playing strength in the next issue.
© 2022 Karen Walker