Counting Your Points and Choosing Your Best Suit

1. Why evaluate your hand before you bid?
You now know the basics of the auction: what a bid is, how a bidding sequence works, and how a contract is reached. The next step is to evaluate the strength of your hand to decide what to bid.
Your bids are a way to communicate the contents of your hand to your partner so that together you can converge toward the best possible contract for your side.
For this to work, everyone must speak the same “language”: a given bid must carry the same meaning for both partners. That’s where a nearly universal tool in bridge comes in: high-card points.

2. The high-card point system
The idea is simple: assign values to the high cards. An Ace is worth 4 points, a King 3, a Queen 2, a Jack 1, and all other cards are worth 0 in this system. Players look at their hand, add up their high-card points, and obtain an estimate of their hand strength.
In the full deck, if you total all the Aces, Kings, Queens and Jacks, you get 40 high-card points, shared among the four players. The average hand therefore contains 10 points: above 10 points, your hand is stronger than average; below 10, it is rather weak.
Since bridge is played in partnerships, what really matters is the combined total between you and your partner. Together, aiming for more than 20 points (above the average 10 + 10) is a good indicator that your side might be able to win more than half the tricks.

3. Choosing the trump suit… or No-Trump
Evaluating strength is not enough; when you bid, you must also decide on a trump suit – or No-Trump. A widely used rule of thumb is to look for a fit in a suit: if you and your partner hold eight cards between you in the same suit (for example five Hearts in your hand and three in your partner’s), that suit is often an excellent choice for trump.
With fewer than eight cards combined, the situation is more fragile, and No-Trump may become the better option.
These general guidelines – high-card points for strength and the eight-card fit for trump – give you a compass to steer your decisions… before you learn, later on, how and when to “aim high”.