Better Bridge in Barry County
By
Gerald Stein
Improve
Your Declarer Play: Five Steps to Simplify the Endplay
By Audrey Grant
$9.95
Softcover, 55 pages, Copyright 2013
Rating: A
Reviewed by Gerald Stein
Are you looking for a stocking stuffer for your
favorite bridge partner for this Christmas? Audrey Grant’s new little book on endplay
strategies will be just the gift for your partner and for yourself as well. Published
in 2013, Audrey Grant’s latest book with an easy-to-read and understandable approach
to the endplay is a must for developing and unfamiliar bridge players who have always
wondered how the experts manage to make more contracts than the average bridge
player. The secret is out, thanks to Audrey Grant and her newest bridge book in
the Audrey Grant Bookmark Series.
In Five Steps
to Simplify the Endplay, Audrey Grant, Canadian bridge writer and an
advocate for better bridge education, takes the reader through five
easy-to-understand ways to improve your declarer play. Her first approach is to
teach you how to recognize the endplay when you are the declarer. While that is
an important first step, Audrey’s ultimate goal is to teach you how to put the
endplay to your use when you and your partner are the declarers. You will be
delighted at her straightforward prose and her many practice hands to perfect
this new declarer strategy. You will look forward to using this new bridge
method at the bridge table in 2014.
Step One of her five ways is called the ABC’s of Declarer’s Plan. Essentially,
her approach is the same as other advocates for better bridge playing. Make a
plan before you even draw one card from the dummy. Making a plan is always the
most important first step for declarer. Make it your New Year’s resolution.
Step Two, once your plan has been made, teaches you
to look for a suit or suits that would be better for you as declarer if the
opponents led that suit for you. Let them do you a favor by leading to you, but
you have to recognize that concept first, and then let your opponents lead to
you. Step two is a recognition of your own hand and the inherent weakness there
if you have to lead the suit yourself. Declarer, know thy hand.
Audrey’s Third Step is to find a loser card that you
have to lose anyway and use it for a new purpose. Not only must you lose this
trick anyway, but you now recognize that you have a new and better use for that
loser card. That purpose is, of course, to exit that suit and force (hopefully)
your opponents to lead back to you, allowing you as the one in fourth seat to
take a winning trick through their help. How very thoughtful of them!
Step Four has to do with eliminating the defenders’
other options. This means eliminating trumps from their hands and at least one
other suit so that you are in complete control of the hand. They will not like
the situation, but they will marvel at your ability to put them into a predicament
and force them to help you make your contract. Congratulations will flow to you
from your partner as well as from your opponents.
Step Five puts it altogether in Audrey Grant’s
excellent contribution to improving bridge players’ play of the hand. Putting
the right defender on lead with your exit card, your losing card anyway, can be
a satisfying moment when you realize that you are improving in your bridge
strategy and declarer play. The inner satisfaction is well worth the small
price of this little book. You and your partner will know that you have reached
a new plateau in your bridge playing by reading and rereading Audrey Grant’s Five Steps to Simplify the Endplay.
Gerald Stein
November 29, 2013
Number of words: 772
Bridge Notes: Brent Manley, editor for the American
Contract Bridge League, has written another review of Audrey Grant’s Improve Your Declarer Play: Five Steps to
Simplify the Endplay in the November issue of the Bridge Bulletin for the American Contract Bridge League. Membership
in the ACBL for 2014 is also a great Christmas gift for your partner and
yourself. Contact www.acbl.org
for membership applications for 2014.
Bridge Notes Two: For more information on other
Audrey Grant books and products, visit her website at www.audreygrant.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment