Better Bridge in Barry County
By Gerald Stein
Title: Planning the Play of a Bridge Hand
Authors: Barbara Seagram and David Bird
Publisher: Master Point Press Toronto, Canada
Published: 2009
This week’s column will be devoted to reviewing a recent bridge book I had the good fortune to read and study during the last few weeks. Planning the Play of a Bridge Hand by well-known bridge teachers and writers, Barbara Seagram of Canada and David Bird of the United Kingdom really resonates with the beginning bridge player but also speaks loudly to the intermediate bridge player as well.
Too often beginning bridge players hear these words from their bridge instructors: “Be sure to make a plan.” Good enough advice, but mostly this well-intended admonition falls on deaf ears, at least at the beginning of their bridge journey. Learning all that is expected of them in a few short weeks, learning how to make a plan falls somewhere near the bottom of the information pile.
Seagram and Bird address this common weakness of many bridge players, and together they offer a plan on how to plan a bridge hand. With straightforward prose with easy-to-understand bridge hands, both bridge authors guide the reader through 17 short chapters in 231 pages. In the Introduction, the authors claim the following: “One note: bidding can be complicated, but the focus of this book is on card-play. We have therefore elected to use only a few simple conventions in our example auctions, including old-fashioned Blackwood (not Roman Keycard), so as not to distract readers.”
The first chapter explains their methodology of teaching bridge players how to make a plan. Of course, everyone has already heard that old adage to stop and look at the hand your partner has presented to you as dummy. The fact that Seagram and Bird have written this book is testimony to the fact that few beginners actually take the time to make a plan. Their eyes simply glass over, and they start to take tricks, hoping that somehow the technique will work and that they will come up with the needed number of tricks to make their contract. This can work, but usually there is a disaster, and the discussion that follows later is usually not a pretty thing to hear. “Why did you…” We have all heard that much too often.
Authors Seagram and Bird break the technique down into two parts: the suit contract and the no trump contract. It sounds surprisingly simple, and the good news is that it is simple to hear, but not so simple to put into action. Here is what they say to do with a suit contract: begin counting the number of losing tricks that you have even before you ever take trick one. Stop and count the number of losers in a suit contract. If your contract is four hearts, and by counting the number of losers first, you may have discovered early enough that you have four losers. That is one too many. Your plan, then, for a trump suit is to make one or more of your losers go away. The ways and means of making those tricks go away is the gist of this book, and each chapter offers ways to make those losers disappear. You will make your contracts and smile more.
The second part of the Seagram-Bird approach in this book is to look at no trump contracts, sometimes the more difficult of challenges for beginner and intermediate bridge players. In this approach, instead of counting the losers as in a trump suit, you merely make your plan by counting the number of winners in your hand and in your partner’s hand. This allows you to determine how many tricks that you have and how many tricks that you need. It is the opposite approach of the trump suit approach, and subsequent chapters offer ways for the reader to gain extra tricks in no trump contracts.
Two ways of making a plan, one for suit contracts and one for no trump contracts, take a no-nonsense approach to making and playing better bridge. Short chapters of six to seven pages, practice quizzes at the ends of each chapter, and detailed answers on the quiz problems are all benefits of this must-read bridge book. To use Barbara Seagram and David Bird’s approach as demonstrated in this little bridge book, do what the authors suggest!
PLAN: I will run right out and borrow, order for purchase, or find someone who has a copy of Planning the Play of a Bridge Hand, and I will read and use it.
Now that’s a plan!
Gerald Stein February 26, 2012 829 words.
(Update on this column: One of the Snowbird readers of the Banner called me from sunny Florida to say that he was enjoying my column. He really wanted to know, however, where he could play bridge in Barry County. Hmmm…that sounds like a future column. Happy Bridge in 2012. )
Visit my bridge blog: http://betterbridgeinbarrycountymichigan.blogspot.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment