Winning Bridge

These Help pages can be downloaded here with the Winning Bridge Shareware game for Microsoft Windows 98, ME, 2000 and XP.

If you would rather read a book, take a look at the Help Index page for some suggestions.

Losing Trick Count

Losing Trick Count (LTC) is a method of estimating how many tricks a partnership will make on average in a suit contract (LTC should not be applied to a no trump contract). For LTC to be valid the partnership should hold at least 8 trumps between them.

Counting Losers

In a 3 card or longer suit only consider the top 3 cards. For each card lower than the queen, count one loser. If the queen is the only honour in the suit it should be counted as 0.5 of a loser. You will note from this that no suit can have more than 3 losers.

In a 2 card suit, any card lower then the king is counted as a loser except A-Q which is counted as 0.5 of a loser.

In a 1 card suit count anything other than the ace as a loser.

The total number of losers in a hand is the total of the number of losers in each suit.

Estimating Partner's Losers

Partner's losers are estimated according to the number of points that they have shown:

There is some scope for interpretation in these estimates, and to a certain extent will depend on whether you are a optimist or a pessimist. The program assumes the lowest limit in each case.

Estimating the Contract Level

To estimate the contract level that should be bid add together the total number of losers in both hands and subtract the total from 24. This gives the number of tricks that can be expected to be made; the level of the bid should be 6 less than the number of tricks.

If the level is greater than that needed for game but less than that for a slam, reduce the bid level to that of game.

If a slam is indicated and the bidding level is not too high, use a slam asking convention to determine whether any controls are missing. What ever LTC tells you about the level, if you have aces and kings missing they can cause a slam to go down.