ADVANCED PLAY AT BRIDGE

I read this book when it first came out. Prior to that, I was a fair bridge player. Afterwards, I was much better at declarer play. The book includes 139 hands which it presents to the reader in the form of a quiz, with detailed answers. It covers counting, card-placing, good and bad breaks, camouflage, communications, squeezes, match-point play, and percentages. The 20-page chapter about percentages was particularly instructive. A bridge player does not need to know much about them. The key knowledge is the distributions between your opponents of 2 through 8 card suits. That means memorizing 16 numbers. That's it. With that knowledge, you can choose easily between lines of play that rely on good breaks or rely on avoiding bad breaks. The other chapter that made a big impression on me was the 30-page one on squeezes. I didn't know anything about squeezes when I first read it. Everyone talked about them, but I'd never intentionally played one. Still, I realized that I'd gone down in a couple of contracts that I could have made had I understood how to play them. I gulped when I read that the author expected the reader to be well aware of how to perform simple single and double squeezes. Anyway, I tried reading the chapter. And rereading it. And that is how I learned how to perform squeezes (they don't come up all the time, so one can play bridge moderately well without doing them). If you are a beginner at bridge, this book will be too advanced for you. But if you have played in a couple of tournaments, you'll be able to understand it and profit from it.