Tiger and the Fly

[inquiry]

I don't quite know how to characterize this book. First for some details, it is all about defense. You are show a dummy and your defensive hand, the bidding, and you go from there. So it is a defensive problem book. A lot of hands deal with deception, where you have to try to lead declarer astray. But there are a lot of other hands where you have to unblock to avoid a throw-in, or break up a squeeze. None of the hands == not a one, are easy. Many are down right next to impossible. I love this book, but I ended up deciding to do no more than one hand per day, and even at that, I usually screwed the hands up (not all of them, but probably more than half).

 

Now problems with the book. First, I don't like the way the hands are presented. Declarer is WEST on every hand, and you are either north or south, and the dummy is East. This is not the usual way to display hands (at least usual for me) and it was off putting. Second, there are a fair number of typo;s, most minor like on the hand partner is said to lead the heart 2 (4ht best) when you hold the two and three yourself. Another slightly more bothersome example is one time in the analysis both north and south end up holding the same cards. Since you know what you started out with, and see what is in declarer's hand at that point you can place all the cards ok without too much work. The translation to english is, however, excellent I think.

 

Another "problem" with the book is in the presentation style. On way too many hands, you start reading and it goes like this... "the bidding was such and so, the opening lead was this card, you won that card and returned the suit... too late, you screwed up." By that i mean, it doesn't follow the usual thing where it leads you up to a point in the play and then ask you what you should do. So if you read the paragraph explaining the opening lead, or what declarer did, you are too frequently given information beyond the point where you had to do the right thing, and then are told by following that information you told happened you already screwed up. I am not a fan of that style, but perhaps we all play too much that way at the table. So, if you buy this book, read only as far as the opening lead, stop reading and work from there (knowing the dummy and the opening lead). Don't even respect the first card they tell you that you play to trick one until you know everything you can figure out about the hand and you agree with it.

 

I don't think this is a book to rush out and get UNLESS you are an expert -- or very high performing advanced player. A lot of people will not get much out of the content as the required defense and things that needed to be considered will be beyond their skill level. Having said that, I think this book is EXTREMELY good at demonstrating expert level defensive thinking. I choose to ignore the typos and style problems and even the annoying way many of the problems are presented and give this book a four-star rating. Others may not be able to overlook these problems, and in fact if I had a 3 1/2 star option in the poll, I would have subtracted a half star for the little annoyances.

[bluecalm]

. I choose to ignore the typos and style problems and even the annoying way many of the problems are presented and give this book a four-star rating. Others may not be able to overlook these problems, and in fact if I had a 3 1/2 star option in the poll, I would have subtracted a half star for the little annoyances.

 

Yes, editing and English sucks, clearly not work of professional editor/translator.

That being said, I think the hands in this book (and others with animals in the title) are about the only resource available for truly advanced and beautiful hands (except maybe AICP but this one is not practical at all, so pure entertainment:)).

[the hog]

Now see, that is where i think you are wrong. There are a number of chapters in AICP which are extremely relevant. Trump elopement for example.