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The HCP Matrix

#21 User is offline   billyjef 

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Posted 2019-January-15, 08:42

 nige1, on 2019-January-15, 07:36, said:

Our misunderstanding might have arisen from a difference of opinion over LTC. IMO, it's quite a good at estimate of trick-taking potential at suit contracts.


It's interesting how my "objectivity" often gets interpreted as condemnation because I speak critically of something.

I love your father's WTC. I think the idea of WTC is a lot as it is more accessible to visualizing the trick taking potential of the hand. I think, as you suggest, that the trick expectation of short suits is too liberal. But that is just a intuitive guess. I don't know definitively.

As a teacher of New LTC, because, I too, know it is a good estimate of trick-taking potential at suit contracts, I have to make concerted efforts to help students realize how using NiLT, as one student calls it, translates into winning tricks. And it isn't just student's, even among other advocates of LTC, the fact we are trying to estimate a hands trick taking potential gets lost in the minutia of each persons favorite LTC adjustments.

On the upside, several new students in the past year, hearing how I emphasize intrinsic trick taking potential, when asked to evaluate their hand, will reply, "In (my suit or at notrump) I expect my hand to take (such number) of tricks." Even I'm not that fluent in trick taking language; my mind first goes to HCP or LTC.

All this is why I titled the thread HCP Matrix...I could have called it the LTC Matrix or KnR Matrix...where what is measured by the tool is lost in a fantasy world where the measured is inconsequential to the worship of the tool. I find myself in such Matrices all the time.

In life and bridge, for me, nothing is sacred. Keeping that in mind, everything is subject to critical analysis without intending judgement.
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#22 User is offline   billyjef 

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Posted 2019-January-15, 08:59

 hrothgar, on 2019-January-15, 07:53, said:

A decade or so back there was a very long discussion about Zar Points

Much of the talk involved using trick taking potential as a way of measuring the accuracy of various metrics for evaluating hand strength.
You might find this of interest.



I'll search it out.

I still think it is bazaar that we don't routinely measure an hand evaluation by it's accuracy to predict expected trick taking potent. I sympathize with the desire to use whatever wins the most, and that can be satisfactory enough. But when the majority of people can't tell you how many tricks they are contracting to take when they open the auction or bid...something is lost, I think. I was lost; then I woke up ;)

How many tricks is an opening hand in ones system?
How many tricks are an invitational/limit raise in that system?
Tricks for a constructive raise?
etc.

Ask your average player, they can tell you the HCP range, but potential tricks those HCP represents?
Jef Pratt
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#23 User is offline   maartenxq 

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Posted 2019-January-15, 10:18

 pescetom, on 2019-January-14, 03:21, said:

Not that many people ever got to decide whether to open without using HCP. In 1908 it was still obligatory for dealer to open with any hand (weak hands were usually bid as 1S, so much for those nostalgic of a natural past ). In 1915 Bryant mccambell was already advocating the 4321 points scale and by 1927 Milton work had made it universal.

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
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#24 User is offline   oddid 

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Posted 2019-January-15, 12:11

What do you think about the point count used by robots?
They are: J=1, Q=2, K=4, A=8. So AJ=8+1=9, AKQ=8+4+1=13, etc.
It might be a quicker way to evaluate the strength of a hand.
Perhaps this way of counting might abide by the actual force of high cards (we know that in the 1234 system the Ace is underevaluated).
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#25 User is offline   cherdano 

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Posted 2019-January-15, 14:00

 pescetom, on 2019-January-14, 03:21, said:

Not that many people ever got to decide whether to open without using HCP. In 1908 it was still obligatory for dealer to open with any hand (weak hands were usually bid as 1S, so much for those nostalgic of a natural past ). In 1915 Bryant mccambell was already advocating the 4321 points scale and by 1927 Milton work had made it universal.

Wow I didn't know they were invented quite
that early. Kind of amazing that the best simple evaluation method was invented and made popular essentially with the birth of contract bridge, and all the inferior crap like the (appropriately named) losing trick count or Banzai points all came later.
The easiest way to count losers is to line up the people who talk about loser count, and count them. -Kieran Dyke
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#26 User is offline   cherdano 

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Posted 2019-January-15, 14:01

 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

Is there a good account of this history somewhere?
The easiest way to count losers is to line up the people who talk about loser count, and count them. -Kieran Dyke
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#27 User is offline   hrothgar 

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Posted 2019-January-15, 14:10

 cherdano, on 2019-January-15, 14:00, said:

Wow I didn't know they were invented quite
that early. Kind of amazing that the best simple evaluation method was invented and made popular essentially with the birth of contract bridge, and all the inferior crap like the (appropriately named) losing trick count or Banzai points all came later.


I was under the impression that the 4-3-2-1 scale dates back to whist
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#28 User is offline   mikeh 

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Posted 2019-January-15, 14:58

 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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#29 User is offline   TylerE 

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Posted 2019-January-15, 15:10

 oddid, on 2019-January-15, 12:11, said:

They are: J=1, Q=2, K=4, A=8. So AJ=8+1=9, AKQ=8+4+1=13, etc.


That seems hopelessly extreme.

Axxx Axx Axx Axx is not a better hand than KQJx KQJ KQJ KQJ

More reasonable methods I've seen value something Like J=0.5 Q=2 K=3 A=4.5 - which has the advantage of there still being 40 pts in the deck.
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#30 User is offline   pescetom 

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Posted 2019-January-15, 16:07

 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.


I was actually being ironic, in that the point count was already established but Milton took his time to give it the US stamp of approval. I wouldn't be surprised if it was already around in whist, as hrothgar suggests. Culbertson still advocated (for a few years only) honour tricks, but I don't think that has much to do with either his claim to the centre of the US bridge scene or the way he obtained it - his wife was apparently a devastating player, unlike Lenz who caused Jacoby to quit the battle in disgust.
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#31 User is offline   barmar 

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Posted 2019-January-15, 16:23

 oddid, on 2019-January-15, 12:11, said:

What do you think about the point count used by robots?
They are: J=1, Q=2, K=4, A=8. So AJ=8+1=9, AKQ=8+4+1=13, etc.
It might be a quicker way to evaluate the strength of a hand.
Perhaps this way of counting might abide by the actual force of high cards (we know that in the 1234 system the Ace is underevaluated).

That's not how the robots count HCP. They use that honor count for keeping track of which honors have been shown when cue bidding, and for expressing suit honor quality. A separate honor count is tracked for each suit.

#32 User is offline   Lovera 

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Posted 2021-December-17, 16:51

"Already from 1929, the date of the first publication of the Blue Book, the Culbertson system, the famous "approach forcing", began to spread throughout America with a beating drum. Everyone was talking about his team's victory in the famous Vanderbilt Cup and in other tournaments. Gradually, thanks largely to his extraordinary sense of publicity, Culbertson managed to make his name synonymous with "contract", this new bridge that Harold Vanderbilt had endeavored to introduce to all the great American clubs. But the unprecedented success provoked a violent reaction from bridge writers; the cyclone "Culbertson" threatened to make them disappear. They thought their only chance of survival was to band together and publish another system. And it was precisely for this reason that in the summer of 1930, the "Official System" saw the light. In this system there were neither "honors" nor "quick tricks" and the strength of the No Trump was evaluated according to the score of the points 4,3,2,1 that Milton Work had just created. There were no openings of "strong two" but a "two clubs" on which the longest color was given. Finally, the mandatory biddings were totally different". As for the clash between Lenz and Jacoby this happened because he had performed a psychic that did not give (to Lenz) any indication while Jacoby reproached Lenz for having badly counterplayed by declaring that for him this was the last time he played (he was replaced by Winfield Ligget jr) but at that moment "the result of the match, however, was no longer in play because the advantage had gradually increased (after being behind by 7,000 points) until it reached 20,000 points (at the end of the match won with 8,980 points)".[Bridge dei Campioni-Bridge A' La Une pagg. 64 and 68 by Jose' Le Dentu](Lovera)
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