Editing Losing-Trick Count (section)

==History==
The origins of the Losing Trick Count (LTC)—without that name—can be traced back at least to 1910 in [[Joseph Bowne Elwell]]'s book ''Elwell on Auction Bridge'' wherein he  sets out, in tabular form,<ref>{{cite book |last = Elwell |first = Joseph Bowne |title = Elwell on Auction Bridge |publisher = Charles Scribner's Sons |location = New York|year = 1910 | pages = 80–89}}</ref> a scheme for counting losers in trump contracts similar to the basic counting method given below.

The term "Losing Trick Count" was originally put forward by the American F. Dudley Courtenay in his 1934 book ''The System the Experts Play'' (which ran to at least 21 printing editions).<ref name= BourkeSugden>{{cite book |last1 = Tim |first1 = Bourke |author-link1 = Tim Bourke |last2 = Sugden |first2 = John |title = Bridge Books in English from 1886-2010: an annotated bibliography |publisher = Bridge Book Buffs |location = Cheltenham, England |pages = 92–93 |year = 2010 |isbn = 978-0-9566576-0-2}}</ref> Among various acknowledgments, the author writes: 'To Mr. Arnold Fraser-Campbell the author is particularly indebted for permission to use material and quotations from his manuscript in which is described his method of hand valuation by counting losing tricks, and from which the author has developed the Losing Trick Count described herein.'

The Englishman George Walshe and Courtenay edited the American edition and retitled it ''The Losing Trick Count'' for the British market; first published in London in 1935, the ninth edition came out in 1947.<ref name =BourkeSugden/> Subsequently, it has been republished by [[print-on-demand]] re-publishers.

The LTC was also popularised by [[Maurice Harrison-Gray]] in ''Country Life'' magazine in the 1950s and 1960s. {{blockquote |text = In its original British edition of years before, it had not been very lucidly presented and it seemed to suffer from a certain wooliness of definition of some of its concepts... With the blessing of Mr. Courtenay, Gray sharpened up the definitions, plugged some holes in the logic and made the whole conception intelligible to the average player. |author = Jack Marx | source = in the Introduction to ''Country Life Book of Bridge'' by M. Harrison-Gray (1972)}}

In recent decades, others have suggested refinements to the basic counting method.