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Home > Bidding > Big hands > The losing trick count

Don't be like

 him. He's

clearly a loser.

The losing trick count

When you hold a highly unbalanced hand, the normal point count ( A=4, K=3 etc ) ceases to be accurate as a measure of the strength of your hand and the likely number of tricks you can take. An easy example is a holding of all thirteen spades. You can take all thirteen tricks provided spades are trumps: but you only have ten points! Most of us would have no trouble in getting excited with this ( unlikely ) holding, but how would we feel with the hand below?

We only have fourteen honour points but we would feel instinctively that with very little help from partner, we should make at least ten tricks in hearts or spades. The way we resolve this apparent paradox is through the losing trick count.

We make the assumption that our only long suit, or one of our long suits will be trumps. If you have only one, it needs to have six cards in it before the method works. If you have two suits, they need at least five cards in each.

You then look at each suit in turn and count how many of ace, king and queen are missing. This number represents the anticipated 'losers' in that suit, taking suit length into account ( If you have two small cards only in a suit, although missing all three high cards, you only have two losers as you can ruff the third round ). Add these losers up and take the result away from thirteen, and this represents the likely number of 'playing tricks' you can expect to make. This a very easy calculation on the hand with thirteen spades. No losers. Thirteen tricks. Bingo! Try the hand we produced earlier.

We only have three losers (one spade, one heart and one diamond ) and so can expect to make ten tricks. This tallies with our gut feeling.

Do not attempt to identify exactly where these tricks are coming from. There will always be an element of guesswork in the arithmetic but it is a reasonable indicator of the strength of a shapely hand.

As you become experienced, you will be looking for a reasonably robust suit if your calculation is to be accurate. Don't forget that you are expecting many of your small cards to take tricks. Implicit in your arithmetic is the assumption that your big ones certainly will. In the hand above, picture partner with only two small cards in each of hearts and spades, and you will have little trouble making ten tricks, losing only one heart, one spade and one diamond at worst. Give yourself the hand below instead.

Our losing trick count is still three, but our suits are very much less robust and each will probably yield more than one loser. Be more cautious in such cases.

Before we look at the losing trick count ( LTC ) in practice, and how it influences our bidding, make sure you've got the idea. See how many losers you can identify in the hands below.

The answers are (1) 3     (2) 7      (3)  4    (4) 5 . If you can't see any of them, drop me an email.

It should be clear that hands (1), (3) and (4) above are strong enough for us to wish to tell partner the good news on our opening bid. We look at these hands in more detail here.

Hand (2) is not strong but offers prospects of a good sacrifice if we can disrupt opponents bidding early enough. This is the principle of preempting, dealt with in detail here.

Notice that the calculation of the LTC applies to one unbalanced hand only. It is quite different when declarer can see both her hands and can often get a very accurate picture of winners and losers without the guesswork inevitably associated with the LTC. See this page.

Also, I must make reference to the practice adopted by a number of players of applying the LTC after partner has opened, as a method of judging the combined strength of the two hands belonging to their side. They argue something like this. My partner has opened and so has a count of seven losers ( Correct: this tallies in general with a 12-point hand ).

I, as responder, have a hand like this, say:-

The analysis is usually based on opener's proposal for a trump suit--say hearts here--eminently suitable. Responder counts losers and also comes up with a count of seven. So, total losers=7+7=14. Take this away from 24 ( a more cautious approach than subtracting from 26 ) and the count of 10 represents a likely number of tricks that the combined hands will make. So we can safely be in a contract of four hearts (they say ). (Note that the more common approach of taking 14 away from 18 to give the contract directly gives the same answer.)

But, responder's LTC is based largely upon a suit that is not trumps, and bearing in mind restricted entries, the spade suit above is highly unlikely to yield the four tricks suggested by the LTC, and the diamond suit is even less likely to yield two tricks.

You will have gathered by now that I don't think much of this approach. If it's not already clear, my point is that an LTC based upon a long trump suit in which tricks with small cards are virtually guaranteed is very different to a dummy with a long suit that is not trumps where the likelihood of tricks with small cards is very much less.

Caveat !