Honor point count
In contract bridge, the honor point count is a system for hand evaluation.
Balanced hands
A balanced hand contains no voids or singletons, at most one doubleton and not more than five cards in any suit. Hand patterns fitting these criteria are 4-3-3-3, 4-4-3-2 and 5-3-3-2 and represent 47.6% of all possible deals. Hands with a 5-4-2-2 pattern are considered semi-balanced and if included in the criteria for balanced hands would raise the probability of being dealt one of the four hand patterns to 58.2%.A common practice is to assign values to the four higher honors, called High Card Points which are a rough estimate of the real value of those cards in a notrump contract:
- Ace = 4 HCP
- King = 3 HCP
- Queen = 2 HCP
- Jack = 1 HCP
Four Aces
In the early thirties Howard Schenken, later author of the Schenken system, formed a successful team called the "Four Aces", together with Oswald Jacoby, Michael T. Gottlieb and David Burnstine. They devised an evaluation method of 3-2-1-0.5, totaling 26 HCP.One over one
George Reith devised another count method about 1927, in which the 10 was assigned 1 point. To maintain proportionality the points assigned were 6-4-3-2-1, making a total of 64.Vienna
The Vienna System was popular among Austrian players before World War II. In 1935 Dr. Paul Stern devised the Vienna system using the Bamberger scale, which ran 7-5-3-1 with no value assigned to the 10.In fact, if we consider that a deck has 13 tricks, and that Aces and Kings win most of the tricks, the evaluation of 4 for an Ace is an undervaluation. Real Ace value is around 4.25, a King is around 3, a queen less than 2. But the simplicity of the 4-3-2-1 count is evident, and the solution to better evaluate is to rectify the total value of the hand after adding the MW points.
Adjustments to MW count
Honors adjustments
- Concentration of honors in a suit increases the value of the hand.
- Honors in the long suits increase the value of the hand. Conversely, honors in the short suits decrease the value of the hand.
- Intermediate honors increase the value of the hand, say KQJ98 is far more valuable than KQ432
- Unsupported honors count less as they have much less chance to win a trick or to promote tricks. The adjustment made is as follows:
- : count 2 HCP instead of 3 for a singleton K
- : count 1 HCP instead of 2 for a singleton Q
- : count 0 HCP instead of 1 for a singleton J or even Jx
- : decrease 1 point the value of unsupported doubleton honor combinations: AJ, KQ, KJ, QJ
Distributional adjustments
- deduct 1 HCP for a 4333 distribution
- add 1 HCP for having AAAA, i.e., first control in all suits.
- add 1 point for a good five-card suit
Unbalanced hands
The balanced HCP count loses weight as the distribution becomes more and more unbalanced. Unbalanced hands are divided in 3 groups: one-suited, two-suited and three-suited hands. Three-suited hands are evaluated counting HCP and distributional points, DP. The distributional points show the potential of the hand to take low-card tricks including long-suit tricks or short-suit tricks. Opener's DP count are less valuable as responders because usually trumping in the long side does not add tricks to the total number of tricks.Distributional hand values
- doubleton 1 points
- Singleton 2 points
- Void 3 points
- doubleton 1 point
- singleton 3 points
- void 5 points
More distributional hands, such as 6511, 6520, 6610, are better evaluated with the method used for the one-suited hands, that is, counting playing tricks. One-suited hands are evaluated according to the number of winners and/or the number of losers in the long suit and the number of winners/losers in the side suit.