maartenxq, on 2019-January-15, 10:18, said:
Correction: Eventually the Milton point count established itself as universal. In the days of the master himself he wielded a fierce battle with Ely Culbertson c.s. about bidding system, point count and what not. This resulted in the Match of the Century in which the Culberton team defeated Work.
Maarten Baltussen
Interesting take on history. I didn't even know that Milton Work was involved in the match. Sounds like you think he played on the Lenz team, the team usually credited as being the opponents for Culbertson.
As for the 'triumph' of the Work point count, it began as a tool for notrump evaluation and, in the 1930s at least, quick tricks were the standard method of evaluation for suit play.
By the late 1930s some experts began pushing the point count primarily due to its simplicity. Bridge was extremely popular, and so literally millions of players, in NA and elsewhere, were playing, usually at a very weak level even by the standards of todays club level players. a few People got rich from selling bridge books....Culbertson became rich overnight with the publication of the first edition of his Blue Book. Goren was to follow in those footsteps 2 decades later.
Culbertson held out against the point count method until after WWII ended...we start to see articles on point count valuation, for denominations other than notrump, in the Bridge World magazine in the late 1940's and by the early 50's quick trick valuation was essentially dead as a teaching method.
There were all kinds of point counts suggested, some of which were almost surely more precise, in terms of relative value of the honours, than the 4-3-2-1, but the 4-3-2-1 prevailed because it was so simple and easy to learn. It was also reasonably effective, especially with the distributional adjustments popularized by Goren.
One measure of the relative skill level of the average player then as to now is Goren's suggestion that one needed 26 hcp for two balanced hands to make 3N. I read of an analysis of WC hands maybe 20+ years ago, which concluded that 12 opposite 12 would make 3N, played by WC players against WC defenders, about 50% of the time.
All of this is useful knowledge for teachers, and of course many, many words have been published on variations of metrics for hand evaluation.
My take on all of this is that it is no coincidence that none of the more esoteric hand evaluation methods are (as best as I can tell) used or promoted by the very best players in the game. Why?
In my view it is because ANY arithmetical method of hand evaluation will either be too simplistic to be determinative or too complex to be worth applying at the table. Moreover, and obviously I am unable to 'prove' this statement, I seriously doubt that any expert pays much attention to arithmetical assessment of a hand other than, for example, determining whether the hand is 'in range' for a call where the partnership has defined and announced hcp ranges....typically for notrump openers.
Moreover, it is common, if not universal, for experts to upgrade out of or into such 'ranges' based on how they feel about their hand.
For example, if I held A10x Kx AJ109x Q10x, I would open this a 15-17 1N, but I would not do so because I assigned a numerical value to the 10s or the 5 card suit. I'd do it because, having added to 14, I'd 'feel' that this hand was worth at least 15.
The K n R valuation method was an attempt to use metrics to capture how experts feel about hand strength, but I have never heard a real expert ever say that he or she used or relied upon K n R, or indeed any valuation method at all.
My take on it is that the 4321 method is good enough to teach aspiring players the basics. Add some distributional adjustments, preferably for length at the initial assessment, maybe for shortness later in the auction if sensible, and teach the essential need to recount and revalue the hand with every round of bidding, and your student will (if he or she has any talent) soon be better than 70% of the players they may encounter.
My take also in that those who spend huge amounts of time developing or learning more esoteric methods are missing the forest for the trees. Over the years I have (less frequently now, with the aging and lessening of the bridge world) played pairs with convention cards so heavily covered in very fine print that one wondered at how long it took to fill out the card, let alone learn to play all those gadgets.
Almost uniformly such pairs were hopeless. I'm going back a few years now, to when I played more frequently, but my teams, which were not exactly the strongest in the field most times, would beat pairs like this by 100 imps in 28 boards. They knew their methods, but the methods were an incoherent mix of gadgets and the players seemed to have spent all their energies on conventions and forgotten how to think.
Point count, LTC, distributional adjustments, etc are all efforts to simplify a very complex question: how many tricks can my hand take in combination with my partner's hand? Any valuation formed at trick 1 has a very high probability of being 'wrong'. Now, AKQJ109 AKQJ109 x void.....yes, this hand is unlikely to change much as the auction develops, but most hands will. AQ108x is a good spade suit. Say LHO opens 1S. How good is your suit now? What number do you assign to the downgrade? Say RHO opens 1S...what number do you use? Are you valuing for defence or offence? And so on.
There comes a point beyond which efforts to calculate numbers, re hand values, become a barrier to learning how to think.
Keep it simple, stop wasting energy chasing the impossible perfect arithmetical approach, and learn to think.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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