That's fascinating: I take this as saying top players do evaluate and monitor progressive card states but the process is not well documented. Agreed deriving information is the major factor but others would be creation & management of entries,stops, and ducking and unblocking. The factors writers tend to classify as basic technique but do not list and that players at my level tend not to recognize as necessary.
I think too many books on play are written as entertainments (good for sales) and too few as textbooks. Let me take Forquet's "Bridge with the Blue Team" as an example. As an entertaining puff for the Blue Team it's magnificent but as a textbook it stresses the "shock,golly" at the expense of straightforward explanations.
The first hand describes how Chiaradaia made 6 spades on the following:
Forquet, who is one of my favourite writers, waxes eloquent on how Chiaradia "played as if he could see through the backs of the cards" instead of just saying he assumed everything was favourable.
Ch unblocked the spades and created an extra entry to dummy. F describes this as a farsighted unblocking play instead of saying Ch needed another entry to dummy and the unblocking play could not lose and might provide this.
The whole effect is to suggest Ch exercised inimitable genius and not to instruct you how to play a hopeless hand.
The only genuine textbooks I can remember are Love's "Bridge squeezes complete", Mollo & Gardiner's "Card Play Technique" and, perhaps Culbertson's Blue Book.
This post has been edited by Scarabin: 2014-February-18, 22:52