Reading list

[Badmonster]

What are the top five books every advancing intermediate should read?

[cherdano]

How to read your opponents card, How to lose at bridge, some declarer play book (Reese/Mollo/...), Killing Defense.

[Guest Jlall]

Watsons play of the hand plzzzzz

[zasanya]

1)Card Play Technique-Victor Mollo and Nico Gardener

2)Killing Defense at Bridge-Hugh Kelsey

3)Morehead on bidding-(Originally written by Morehead Revised by Alan truscott)

 

These three books will teach an advancing intermediate all that she can learn from books.

 

Then she will require some books which will show levels one can perhaps only aspire and dream about, may not reach but will serve as goals to aim at.

 

4) Bridge with the Blue team-Pietro Fourquet

5)Bridge in the Menagerie-Victor Mollo

[paulg]

The Challenge Match family of books by Kelsey provides a good set of declarer and defensive problems in a very readable format. The bidding is mostly Acol-based but this is largely irrelevant to the quality of the problems.

 

Paul

[ArcLight]

Top 5?

How about the top 50.

Yes , thats right. There is a lot of ground to cover.

You can read some books on fundamental bidding, and this excludes conventions.

 

You need to read books on card play technique:

I liked Mollos (Card Play Technique) more than Watsons, but you wont go wrong reading Watson. Terence Reese has a number of books on various aspects of card play technique.

Card Play Made Easy 1-4 is a good set of smaller books.

The Bird/Smith/Bourke 12 volume Bridge Technique series is ok, but pricey for the material

Kelseys Bridge Odds for Practical Players is also good.

Reeses The Most Puzzling Situations in Bridge Play is good when you get more experience.

 

For Defense you can start with :

Bill Roots How to Defend a Bridge Hand

Eddie Kantars Modern & Advanved Bridge Defense

Frank Stewarts Comprehensive Guide to Defense

Frank Stewarts Winning Defense

I'd save Kelseys Killing Defense and More Killing Defense for later as they are a bit more advanced. Also Woolseys Partnership defense

 

For Deduction / Inferences

Miek Lawrneces - How to Read your Opponents Cards

Countrdown to Winning Bridge

Dormer on Deduction

Better Bridge for the Advancing Player by Frank Stewart

 

I wouldn't worry about Squeezes yet.

Birds Bridge Squeezes for Everyone is a good starting point. Reese and Kelsey have good books

 

I also wouldnt worry so much about false carding

Lawrence & Kelsey have books, as do Rigal and Lipkin

 

 

>How to lose at bridge

I think Arend means SJ Simons How NOT to Lose at Bridge :)

Or "Why you lose at Bridge" or something like that.

 

 

 

Just 5 books?

1,2. you must read a book on basics, so I'd pick Watson over Mollo.. But you should read both

3,4. Eddie Kantars Modern & Advanced Bridge Defense

5,6 How to Reda Your opponents Cards and Frank Stewarts Better Bridge for teh Advancing Player.

 

Frank Stewart is probably the most underrated or unappreciated author (other than Jannersten). He has a number of EXCELELNT books.

[ralph23]

Root, Commonsense Bidding

Root, How to Play a Bridge Hand

Root, How to Defend a Bridge Hand

Simon, Why You Lose at Bridge

Watson, Play of the Hand

Lawrence, How to Read Your Opponents' Cards

Lawrence, Overcalls

Lawrence, Judgment at Bridge

Root & Pavlicek, Modern Bridge Conventions (selectively to read)

Lawrence, Card Combinations

Melville, Moby-Dick

[kenrexford]

My eyes were opened when I read Adventures in Cardplay (Kelsey/Ottlik). Extremely difficult reading, and a lot of work to understand extremely rare occurrences. However, if you get through the work, it opens your eyes to a different game and makes what used to be difficult concepts now less menacing.

 

I also learned a bit from a few books by the Brocks. Same concept, to a lesser degree.

 

Another good read is the collection of Bols tips (cannot remember what the book is called). Some of this stuff is "old" but forgotten by many folks.

 

On a more general note, I'd suggest grabbing some very old books. Take a bit of time to work through some pre-Goren books, like Culbertson era. Again, it is not what is spoon-fed that makes this worthwhile. It is more subtle.

[han]

>How to lose at bridge

I think Arend means SJ Simons How NOT to Lose at Bridge :)

And I thought he meant "Why you lose at bridge"!

 

Instead of theory books I'd take at least 3 puzzlebooks, and read them over and over again. Basically any will do, I like those by Kantar.

[mikeh]

My eyes were opened when I read Adventures in Cardplay (Kelsey/Ottlik).  Extremely difficult reading, and a lot of work to understand extremely rare occurrences.  However, if you get through the work, it opens your eyes to a different game and makes what used to be difficult concepts now less menacing.

 

I also learned a bit from a few books by the Brocks.  Same concept, to a lesser degree.

 

Another good read is the collection of Bols tips (cannot remember what the book is called).  Some of this stuff is "old" but forgotten by many folks.

 

On a more general note, I'd suggest grabbing some very old books.  Take a bit of time to work through some pre-Goren books, like Culbertson era.  Again, it is not what is spoon-fed that makes this worthwhile.  It is more subtle.

No advancing player should even consider Adventures in Card Play as a tool for learning to bid or play better.

 

Don't get me wrong: it is a brilliant book. But, apart from the part that deals with elopement, you could play bridge every day for a 100 years and not need any of the other techniques. I am morally certain that no world championship or Vanderbilt, Riesinger, etc has ever been won or lost on the discovery of a backwash squeeze, and that there are or have been world champions who wouldn't recognize the matrices for entry-shifting or immaterial squeezes if they arose at the table...and wouldn't feel that they should be embarrassed.

 

edited

 

The same is true of suggesting reading old books..... apart from Watson, which was many, many years ahead of its time (just how good would he have been had he not died young?) I collect old bridge books.. books published before 1940, on the whole. I actually read them...

 

Trust me, there is NOTHING in those books, on bidding, that makes any sense in today's environment. The advancing player will find NOBODY with whom to discuss what nuggets there might be.. and there are precious few. There is a reason no-one plays Vienna Club, Culbertson, the Official System, Natural Bridge, and so on. Those methods are inferior to today's methods.

 

If you are interested in the history of the game or seeing the outer limits of play possibilities, then read the old books or Adventures in Card Play... but not as path forward.

 

My own suggestion: get hold of as complete a set of Bridge Worlds as you can from about 1975. Read the Master Solver's Club articles.

 

The strength of the articles:

 

1) while the system changes (but you can always figure it out), the basics from 1975 on are recognizable today

 

2) it is not the actual highest-scoring bid that is of interest but the thought processes on display.. and the editors/participants include some of the best analytical minds ever to play the game

 

The rest of the BWs are also good reading: the defensive problems, the declarer play problems and so on.

 

You can probably find a lot of these if you hunt around... the total cost will likely exceed any 5 books you might buy, but they will give you many, many hours of entertainment and a hugely increased understanding of the game.

 

But I'd still buy Watson first :)

[skjaeran]

>How to lose at bridge

I think Arend means SJ Simons How NOT to Lose at Bridge  :P

The title is "Why you lose at bridge". :)

 

Edit: Sorry, didn't see Hannie's correction.

[Quantumcat]

A very good book is "The Languageof Bidding" by Paul Marston. If you read this and Card Play Technique and understand it all, you'll be better than 90% of players at the club.

[kenrexford]

No advancing player should even consider...

I understand your objection, but I think you may have missed what I gained from reading these books.

 

As to Adventures in Card Play. The insight was not on how to pull off a very strange line. That, as you mentioned, is extremely rare. However, I found that something very interesting occurred. As I started reading, I kept getting lost and having to back up. I then started getting better at following the hands because I started looking at them more four-dimensionally than I had before, more geometrically, perhaps. After reading through the book, a very long process, I went back and did it again, immediately. I then went to the BBO Bridge Master 2000 and played a few hands, and I did better than usual. I then played bridge in the real world, and I started noticing that a lot more squeeze positions seemed to crop up, and I started noticing a lot more earlier in the defense as well. The number of squeeze positions did not increase, but my ability to spot them did. Adventures in Card Play is not all about squeezes, of course. It is about weird hands and weird techniques. But, for me at least, the impact was tremendous in my ability to visualize layouts.

 

As to the old books. Again, the goal is not to learn something new. Rather, I found that placing modern techniques into a context provided a lot of insight into why certain bids developed. For me, the goal was not to learn some secret pwer system lost in time, but to learn what errors and what holes the modern approach was designed to fix. I also found that some theory seemed to be resting on weird premises that have long passed, curing old problems that no longer exist. Sort of like re-building and modernizing an old bridge over an old river that has run dry and filled in. Perhaps rather than reinforcing the cables, we might better be served by simply laying asphalt on the ground now only a foot below us.

[Quantumcat]

That's all well and good but probably what that person meant is that beginner/intermediates need to work at drilling basic techniques and competencies that occur at every match. Counting, forming plans that are capable of achieving the objective, understanding the standard natural bidding rules, etc. You can't appreciate squeezes or an obscure position or a difficult transfer response system if you don't yet have a solid understanding of the basics from which to build from. How many Japanese people have sucessfully learnt english grammar or idioms before memorising the alphabet and the sounds of letter combinations?

[vuroth]

With every post, I look up over my monitor and see Watson sitting there, unread. Hmm...

[y66]

One bridge book I actually read from cover to cover and highly recommend is At The Table by Bob Hamman. Love these parts from Chapter 20 - A Competitive Game:

 

“… Ask yourself a series of questions. … What is going on? What is the picture I’m looking at? Where is the ball? If you don’t know where the ball is, it’s pretty hard to pick it up.”

 

“… Bridge players -- and this includes some pretty damned good ones -- often make the mistake of asking themselves, “What should I do now?” That is seldom the right question. The right question is, “What in the hell is going on?” Unless you know what’s going on, it’s very hard to figure out what to do.”

 

“… Maintaining concentration is much more important than working on the electronic three-way no trump or any other convention. We’re not talking about a factor of 1.01 -- we’re talking about a factor of 20.”

 

Can't wait to figure out how to do these “simple” things at the table some day!

 

p.s. joshs posted a nice list of books for advancing players in the Book Reviews thread under General Bridge Discussion. I haven’t read all of them, but they look pretty good to me. I did once follow up on a music tip of his that panned out. :)

[skjaeran]

I'd start with Hugh Kelsey's series of Test Your "Tecnique" (Card reading, Communications, Defencive Play, Elimination Play, Finessing, Pairs Play, Percentages, Safety Play, Trump Control). I'm not sure that's the complete list of titles. Every book consist of 36 hands. Very instructive hands and superbly written. Every problem start with your hand and dummy, the bidding, opening lead and if needed the first few tricks. And a review of the problem presented on the right hand page. The solutions are given overleaf.

 

A lot of good stuff for advancing players.

[kenrexford]

That's all well and good but probably what that person meant is that beginner/intermediates need...

A beginner/intermediate is not the same as an advancing intermediate. I have never read anything in any bridge book that is too complicated for an advancing intermediate.

[Badmonster]

That's all well and good but probably what that person meant is that beginner/intermediates need...

A beginner/intermediate is not the same as an advancing intermediate. I have never read anything in any bridge book that is too complicated for an advancing intermediate.

I hope that I haven't misrepresented. I think I'm an advancing intermediate, but many books feel way over my head. Maybe I'm an intermediate, intermediate hoping to advance.

[ralph23]

I hope that I haven't misrepresented. I think I'm an advancing intermediate, but many books feel way over my head. Maybe I'm an intermediate, intermediate hoping to advance.

You didn't ask about other media, but I found (years ago) a series of three video tapes by Bill Root to be extremely helpful.

 

THere are 3 in all: one on bidding, one on play and one on defense. (The bidding one contains some "obsolete" [if that's the word] methods, e.g. he doesn't teach limit raises but 1M-3M as strong GF, but you just have to make adjustments and be aware of this.... which is not hard to do at your level.).

 

You can I think probably order them through ACBL or Baron Barclay or one of those kind of places. I think it's more fun than reading books, myself !!

 

THere are some other tapes out there but I'm not familiar with them. Hard to go wrong with Root, however. His examples are always good and well thought out and he was an excellent teacher as well as well as a super player ... a rare combination. (Ironically, many very good players are too good to be good teachers... they can't relate to their students who are too far below them.)

[zasanya]

That's all well and good but probably what that person meant is that beginner/intermediates need...

A beginner/intermediate is not the same as an advancing intermediate. I have never read anything in any bridge book that is too complicated for an advancing intermediate.

I hope that I haven't misrepresented. I think I'm an advancing intermediate, but many books feel way over my head. Maybe I'm an intermediate, intermediate hoping to advance.

Curious to know which books you think are 'way over your head' . Could you name a few?

[jtfanclub]

Curious to know which books you think are 'way over your head' . Could you name a few?

I can only get about two thirds of the way through 'how to defend a bridge hand'. I've been told that I'm good at performing squeezes, but I still wouldn't recognize most of them if I bumped into them on the street.

[EricK]

The book which improved my game more than any other single book is "Step by Step Discarding" by Danny Roth. The number of contracts (or at MP, overtricks) which are thrown away by poor discarding is phenomenal. Get this right and watch your results shoot up!

[ralph23]

Curious to know which books you think are 'way over your head' . Could you name a few?

I can only get about two thirds of the way through 'how to defend a bridge hand'. I've been told that I'm good at performing squeezes, but I still wouldn't recognize most of them if I bumped into them on the street.

Love's Bridge Squeezes Complete (is that the exact right name of it?) is an incredibly good book and imo a true classic, but it's hard for an advancing intermediate imho, especially the later and more esoteric chapters.

 

The Reese book on squeezes is considerably more accessible.

 

The Kelsey books on defense (Killing Defence etc.) are superb and some of the best bridge books ever written, and the example hands are so very instructive, but it's also a bit inaccessible imo for the advancing intermediate. Root and Kantar are better places to start for the intermediate imo.