Bridge books and supplies - Highly Recommended

Bridge Books - Highly Recommended

	Handmade fabric card holder
	Emillie Simpson
	Rest your wrists and hold your cards in style with a customized card holder. Measures about 8 by 11 inches: one half is weighted and rubber-backed to grip the table surface, the other half hangs over the edge, letting you see your cards with no worry of anyone else getting a peek because of you holding them at the wrong angle. Available in card-themed, nature, or floral fabric patterns. Click for more details and larger photos or send an email to ask about available fabric patterns.
	$25.00		Available now and ready to ship

	The Lebensohl Convention Complete
	Ron Andersen
	Thorough coverage of all three common uses of Lebensohl: after a 1NT opening, after opponents' weak two-bids, and after partner's reverse. Many example hands shown. Have your partner read this book and never have another expensive Lebensohl misunderstanding! One of the very few books on a specific convention to ever make it onto my "Recommended" list.
	$8.95		Available now and ready to ship

	I Love This Game
	Sabine Auken
	Hear the top-ranked woman player in the world describe her favourite moments in her bridge career, and share her philosophy of the game. This is my personal favorite of all the expert biographies on the market.
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Bridge Endplays for Everyone
	David Bird
	Sequel to his popular book on squeezes, this book walks you step by step how endplays work and how to identify situations where they are useful. Loser-on-loser plays and strip squeezes are also covered.
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Off-Road Declarer Play: Unusual Ways to Play a Bridge Hand
	David Bird
	Fourteen chapters of advice on how to handle unpleasant problems in the play of the hand when the easy "textbook" solutions don't apply: ways to reach an apparently entryless dummy, to unblock blocked suits, to cope with bad trump breaks, to rectify the count for a squeeze when the obvious way of giving up a trick is dangerous, and more.
	$18.95		By special order only

	The Art of Declarer Play
	Tim Bourke and Justin Corfield
	The first two sentences of the foreword sum up this book perfectly: "Learning happens at the point of resistance. When you can solve a problem relatively easily, you feel good about your game, but have not learned a thing." Winner of the ABTA Book of the Year award, and acclaimed as 'the best new book on play since Adventures in Cardplay' by some.
	$26.00		Available now and ready to ship

	Great Hands I Wish I Had Played
	Sally and Raymond Brock
	When's the last time you said to yourself, "gee, I wish I could play that last hand over again!"? You'll feel better knowing that experts say the same thing to themselves more often than you'd think. The Brocks tattle on themselves, showing dozens of real-life hands, and showing how they should have been played and why. (And yes, they confess what really happened at the table on each deal, too.) Warning: Out of Print! These are the last two copies I am likely to ever have.
	$14.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Leading Questions in Bridge
	Sally Brock
	An opening-leads book with a twist. It has a chapter for each of the common nuggets of opening-lead advice: fourth from your longest and strongest against notrump, singleton against a trump contract, and so on - and then examines each of these in detail, showing several examples where the "nursery rhyme" is right and where it is wrong, explaining how to tell the difference.
	$17.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Bridge at the Edge
	Boye Brogeland
	Read the biography of Norway's star player and learn his favorite conventions and declarer-play tips. The man who spearheaded the huge bridge cheating busts of 2015 and brought down Fisher-Schwartz and Fantoni-Nunes!
	$21.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Bridge with Another Perfect Partner
	John Carruthers
	Do you have one of those partners who always knows exactly what you did wrong, but never seems to admit to making any mistakes himself? A novel about the trials and tribulations of playing with a know-it-all partner. (And a homage to a long out-of-print P.F. Saunders book on the same theme, published in the UK in the 1970s.)
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Bridge Crosswords
	Jeff Chen
	A collection of fifty bridge-themed crossword puzzles, comparable in difficulty to the classic New York Times puzzles (for which Jeff Chen also occasionally composes.) A great gift for your bridge friends!
	$12.95		Available now and ready to ship

	To Bid or Not to Bid: the Law of Total Tricks
	Larry Cohen
	Perhaps the single most influential bridge book of the 1990s! The "Law of Total Tricks" is based on the simple fact that an extra small card in a long suit is worth an extra trick if your suit is trump and nothing if it is not. The more trumps you have the higher you can afford to bid, even on hands without much high-card strength. In this book, Cohen covers the most common situations in competitive auctions and gives good rules of thumb for whether to bid on or defend. Your bidding judgment will improve overnight when you start following the Law!
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Right Through the Pack
	Robert Darvas and Norman de Vere Hart
	A collection of fifty-two deals, one in which each card in the deck is the key to the whole hand. People have written lots of stories about cards -- but this is a story told by the cards looking up at the people holding them. A delightful fairy-tale-like atmosphere, achieved by looking at the familiar from an unfamiliar angle without having to resort to a completely made-up "Mollo's Menagerie" type world.
	$14.95		By special order only

	Standard Bidding with SAYC
	Ned Downey and Ellen Pomer
	Every checkbox and convention on the Standard American Yellow Card explained by two of the Internet's leading bridge teachers. The most comprehensive guide to standard bidding since Bill Root's Commonsense Bidding. Do you really know what you are agreeing to when you sit down with a stranger and ask "SAYC, pd?" After you read this book you will!
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Swiss Team Tactics
	Harold Feldheim
	A detailed look at how Swiss Teams strategy differs from longer knockout teams matches and from pairs play. Special sections on how to cope with exceptionally weak or strong opponents. This is a very underrated book, very readable, and the bidding and delcaring advice is excellent in general even if you don't play Swisses particularly often. A popular out-of-print item. Only one left in stock!
	$10.00		Available now and ready to ship

	A Switch in Time
	Matthew and Pamela Granovetter
	One of the best books on defensive signals ever written, finally back in print after being impossible to find for almost 20 years. The definitive book on the "Obvious Shift Principle," which clears up confusion about when to encourage or discourage at trick one with marginal holdings in the suit partner led. It is no exaggeration to call Obvious Shift the experts's secret weapon on defense.
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Battling the Best: My Journey Through the 2014 Reisinger
	Sartaj Hans
	The author describes in detail his experience playing in the Reisinger Board-a-Match Teams, the toughest event in the North American tournament calendar. He covers interesting bidding, defense, and declarer play problems, that arose at his table, as well as sharing the thoughts than ran through his mind at different stages of the contest. A great way to be immersed in the tournament experience for those of us who haven't been there ourselves yet!
	$18.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Standard Bridge Bidding for the 21st Century
	Max Hardy
	Max Hardy believed that modern 2/1 was "the new Standard American" and was what all bridge players in the 21st century should learn. He may have overestimated the popularity of 2/1 a little bit, but he wrote a terrific introduction to the principles of 2/1 that anyone planning to play tournament bridge today shouldn't be without. This book concentrates on the bread-and-butter sequences of 2/1: establishing a game force, setting trumps at a low level to save room for slam exploration, making full use of tools like the splinter bid to evaluate how well your hands fit together.
	$20.00		By special order only

	The Mysterious Multi: How to Play It, How to Play Against It
	Mark Horton and Jan van Cleef
	Complete coverage of all the most common variations of the Multicolored 2D opening. In the same style as Andy Stark's volume on playing the weak notrump. Also discussed in detail are the two-suited 2H and 2S openings popular in Europe among Multi players ("Muiderberg"), and the ACBL-published defenses to the Multi. Don't be afraid of conventions, learn to cope with them, and even embrace them and play them yourself!
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Polish Club International
	Krzsysztof Jassem
	A readable introduction to the world's most popular and successful forcing-but-not-strong club system, as described by a 2010 poll of Polish experts: the Polish equivalent of "Bridge World Standard."
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Eddie Kantar Teaches Modern Bridge Defense
	Eddie Kantar
	An updated and reorganized rewrite of Kantar's classic 1974 "Bible of defense." Perhaps the most readable and enjoyable intermediate defense book on the market today!
	$25.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Take Your Tricks: 550 Declarer-Play Tips You Can Take to the Bank
	Eddie Kantar
	The title says it all! Back in print after a very long wait. One of Kantar's most popular books in the 1990s, and the advice on declarer play is as relevant today as ever.
	$17.00		Available now and ready to ship

	The Bridge Philosopher
	James Kauder
	Reprinted and retitled edition of Kauder's classic book Creative Card Play. My personal favorite of all "collections of bridge deals" books and I am delighted to see it back in print. Every one of the hands has a logical but non-textbook solution; he explains the clues from the bidding, play, and his reading of the opponents' habits that guide him to the winning line.
	$18.00		Available now and ready to ship

	Bridge Philosopher 3
	James Kauder
	Volume 3 of Jimmy Kauder's advice on advanced declarer play. Humorous stories about hands where it pays to not just take the first line you see.
	$22.00		Available now and ready to ship

	Crocs on Squeeze Play, v. 1
	Stephen Kennedy
	A young British international takes you on a guided tour of what Clyde Love called the "hinterland of squeeze territory", sparkling with sharp wit as well as sharp analysis. Coverage of some "old" squeezes that are rarely plumbed in depth like Reese's 'Winkle', and some you've never even heard of before.
	$24.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Improve Your Bidding Judgment
	Neil Kimelman
	A series of cogent essays, each focusing on one particular situation and helping you understand how to think about the problem at hand rather than mechanically following a bidding rule.
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	The Right Bid at the Right Time
	Neil Kimelman
	Third in Neil Kimelman's trilogy of bidding-judgment books, published March 2016. The three volumes are roughly in order of complexity: this one emphasizes tough competitive decisions.
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	The Thin Fine Line
	Neil Kimelman
	A close look at close bidding decisions and how to choose which call is better. Even better than Neil's first, more general, book of bidding advice.
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Persistent Human Bridge Errors
	Danny Kleinman and Nick Straguzzi
	Further tales of Chthonic, the perfect bridge-playing computer, and the trouble he has making sense of his human partners, teammates, and opponents. Not just stories - each story has a moral, a lesson about mistakes mere mortals frequently make at the table. Lots of material that didn't appear in The Bridge World!
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	The Principle of Restricted Talent
	Danny Kleinman and Nick Straguzzi
	The adventures of a wisecracking bridge-playing robot and his inventors. Logical solutions to dozens of very difficult cardplay and defense problems, mixed into a series of short stories. One of the best recent contributions to the "bridge novel" genre.
	$18.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Cue Bidding to Slams
	Ron Klinger
	A whole book specifically about control-showing bids -- a vastly more powerful slam exploration technique than Blackwood, but one overlooked by many new bridge players. Emphasizes the traditional ("aces first") style, touches briefly on Italian and Sweep cuebids. For the Italian style (either aces or kings first), see Ken Rexford's Cuebidding: a Modern Approach.
	$16.00		By special order only

	The Modern Losing Trick Count
	Ron Klinger
	If you are ready to look beyond the high-card point and refine your bidding judgment, this is the book for you. One of the great books on hand evaluation. The Losing Trick Count is a simple yet surprisingly accurate hand evaluation method, known in the 1930s but temporarily forgotten in the enthusiasm for point count bidding in the 40s and 50s. It has several advantages over HCP: it accounts naturally for the importance of having fitting rather than scattered honors; and because it forces you to think about counting tricks rather than points, it makes adjustments to the raw count simple -- instead of memorizing rules like subtracting a point for an unguarded face card, you simply count a card that the bidding tells you is unlikely to win a trick as a loser and vice versa!
	$17.99		Available now and ready to ship

	The Power of Shape
	Ron Klinger
	Understand how your distribution impacts the value of your face cards. General theory, advice on when it is right to over- or under-bid, and chapters on how to handle modern bidding tools like the splinter bid. Recently reprinted,and marked down from the $22.95 cover price!
	$19.95		By special order only

	A Bridge to Simple Squeezes
	Julian Laderman
	A new approach to helping intermediate players understand how squeezes work, beginning with identifying potential threats at the beginning of the play through to completing the execution of the squeeze.
	$18.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Useful Probability for Bridge
	Julian Laderman
	A very readable exposition of how to solve at-the-table problems with the help of probability. He goes out of his way to make the math as painless as possible, and emphasizes situations where a player's experience already guides him most of the way to the answer. Suit breaks, HCP, and much more.
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Falsecards
	Mike Lawrence
	A rarely-covered aspect of declarer play (and of defence), discussing all the situations when you shouldn't automatically play your lowest card when you can't win the trick, win as cheaply as possible when you can, and so on. The so-called "mandatory falsecards" have to be a part of every good player's technique even if you are not interested in deliberate deception. Recently reprinted, like the other Mike Lawrence classics.
	$21.95		Available now and ready to ship

	How to Read Your Opponents' Cards
	Mike Lawrence
	A systematic discussion of how to assemble clues from your opponents' bidding and early leads to enable you to place the unseen key cards like the experts do. A very readable introduction well worth reading twice!
	$14.95		Available now and ready to ship

	The Complete Book on Overcalls in Contract Bridge
	Mike Lawrence
	New revised and expanded version of Lawrence's classic comprehensive overcalls book.
	$21.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Tips on Bidding
	Mike Lawrence
	A detailed and example-filled tour of some of the most common problems in the uncontested auction: when to raise on 3-card support, how reverses work, when to splinter, and more.
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Never a Dull Deal: Faith, Hope, and Probability at Bridge
	Robert MacKinnon
	The sequel to MacKinnon's previous book, Bridge, Probability, and Information. More readable and conversational than the first volume, the emphasis is on illustrating key probability concepts with humorous anecdotes at the bridge table, not on dry theory.
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Card Play Technique, or the Art of Being Lucky
	Victor Mollo and Nico Gardener
	An old classic that has long been out of print. A humorous and accessible guide to all of the standard techniques, from simple to advanced. Declarer play and defense advice in alternating chapters. If someone recommended Watson's Play of the Hand to you and you found it too dry, try Mollo instead!
	$22.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Multi-Landy: The Killer Defense vs. 1NT
	David Oakley
	Detailed coverage of the newest trend in overcalling your opponent's 1NT opening, taking over the ACBL by storm after it became a General Convention Chart method in 2015. Particularly important is the discussion of why it's OK to use an artificial double against a weak notrump — waiting for a penalty double is just too rare! Show your shape any time you have sound overcall values, and let your partner pass for penalties with a misfitting decent hand.
	$18.95		Available now and ready to ship

	When to Draw Trumps
	Adam Parrish
	The author introduces his process for counting losers and choosing a line of play. That's what drives our decision whether or not to pull trumps immediately: do we need the trumps for something else (like ruffing a loser?) do we need to take a fast discard before driving out a high trump? How will our plan change if trumps break 4-1 instead of 3-2? Fred Karpin's classic book The Drawing of Trumps and Its Postponement (now out of print) was one of the most valuable books on declarer play I read when I first learned bridge. Now this book brings this material to a new generation of players.
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Matchpoint Defense
	Jim Priebe
	A collection of defensive problems, highlighting how matchpoint play differs from teams or social play. Your goal isn't always to set the contract.
	$18.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Thinking on Defense: the Art of Visualization in Bridge
	Jim Priebe
	One of my favorite books on defense. Not a set of rules to follow; it is practice visualizing partner's and declarer's hands, and focusing on the key features of a deal to defend it well.
	$18.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Accurate Cardplay
	Terence Reese and Roger Trezel
	A reprint in one volume of four of the classic Reese-Trezel books on cardplay: safety plays, blocking and unblocking, ducking, and eliminations.
	$19,95		Available now and ready to ship

	Imaginative Cardplay
	Terence Reese and Roger Trezel
	A reprint in one volume of four more of the classic Reese-Trezel books on cardplay. This volume covers odds, combining your chances, and deceptive declarer play.
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	The Rodwell Files
	Eric Rodwell and Mark Horton
	A compliation of declarer play and defense techniques, with Eric Rodwell's advice on how to recognize each sitation and take advantage of it. The introduction is deceptively simple, the late portions extremely complex.
	$27.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Commonsense Bidding
	Bill Root
	The single best book on the market today about good old-fashioned Standard American bidding. Literally every common bidding situation (and a lot of uncommon ones!) that doesn't involve any conventions fancier than Stayman and Blackwood is in here. This book is my first recommendation to new bridge players after they finish their first course of lessons. A solid grounding in natural bidding principles is essential to know what conventions are worth learning and when to use them. Also ideal for the serious rubber bridge player who needs to be able to bid effectively with unfamiliar partners without time for a long discussion about partnership methods.
	$16.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Modern Bridge Conventions
	Bill Root and Richard Pavlicek
	More than "just" a description of how the 50 or so most popular bidding conventions work. It also goes into great detail about how the second and third rounds of bidding unfold after each convention is used; how different conventions interact with each other; and how to cope with the loss of the natural bid you had to give up to adopt the convention. Every convention in the book is rated as a "one-, two-," or "three-star convention" according to how complex it is, making it easier for new players to decide which conventions are worth their effort to learn. An appendix shows how to mark each convention on the ACBL convention card. There are several newer conventions books on the market today, but this one had stood the test of time. Exceptionally well-written and thorough, it is still my top pick in this category.
	$16.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Challenge Your Declarer Play
	Danny Roth
	A collection of 60 declarer play problems. Danny is careful not to give away the winning line by leading you up to the key trick and asking what card to play. The problems reinforce the importance of making a plan at trick one: count your winners and losers, carefully choose your goal and find the line of play most likely to enable you to succeed. A steal at $9.95, compared to most recently published quiz books!
	$9.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Don't Be Fooled! Countering Deception at Bridge
	Danny Roth
	A long overdue look at how to cope with your opponent's routine and not-so-routine attempts to throw sand in your eyes. An essential part of the expert's toolbox, but a topic rarely visited by the non-pros.
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	How Good is your Bridge?
	Danny Roth
	An outstanding collection of declarer play and defense problems. The book is divided into four equal quarters: instructional declarer practice hands, a declarer play quiz, instructional defense practice hands, and a defense quiz. Excellent material for both matchpoint and IMP/rubber bridge players: he takes time to discuss when a safety play is available and whether or not it should be taken.
	$18.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Expert Bridge Simplified: Arithmetic Shortcuts for Declarer
	Jeff Rubens
	A tour de force explaining how declarer can estimate the chances of various lines of play suceeding -- not just the basic things like 3-3 breaks, but the chance of a squeeze working because two suits break badly but the same opponent has length in both. Clear logical explanations alternating with challenging practice problems.
	$23.95		Available now and ready to ship

	The Secrets of Winning Bridge
	Jeff Rubens
	A long-awaited reprint and update of one of the great classics. The chapters on hand evaluation alone are worth the price of the book, but there is also great advice about play at both matchpoints and IMPs.
	$23.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Play it Safe!
	Barbara Seagram and David Bird
	A new declarer play lesson from Barbara Seagram, covering not just "safety plays," but how to choose the best line for a given suit combination to produce a given number of tricks. She also covers MP vs. IMP considerations, and how the play of a suit fits into the whole hand.
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Splinter Bids
	Barbara Seagram and Linda Lee
	An introduction to how splinter bids work, when to use them and when not to use them. Particularly insightful is the advice on how to handle hands with a singleton honour. Many examples and practice hands, as with all of the books in the Seagram and Lee "Practice Your Bidding" series.
	$6.95		Available now and ready to ship

	The Weak Notrump: How to Play It, How to Play Against It
	Andy Stark
	The complete guide to the 12-14 notrump opening. "How to Play It" covers transfer-style responses, two-way stayman, adjustments to the rest of your bidding system, coping with interference, and more: "How To Play Against It" discusses reasons why you should defend differently vs. strong and weak notrumps, and offers both a simple and a scientific defense to try. You may also be interested in Mark Horton's companion volume on the Multicolored 2D opening.
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	How to Play Bridge with your Spouse and Survive
	Roselyn Teukolsky
	It really IS possible to have a successful partnership with your spouse -- in fact there are several good reasons why that can be an ideal situation for you! Part autobiography, part humor, part bridge textbook, and part marriage counselor. A look at how a bridge partnership evolves as the people involved date, marry, have children, and cope with midlife crises. (And yes, the book has a happy ending!)
	$17.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Playing 2/1: The Rest of the Story
	Paul Thurston
	Paul Thurston's advice on how to play all the latest bidding gadgets, including extensive sections on XYZ and on modern cuebidding and slam exploration styles.
	$19.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Winning Declarer Play
	Dorothy Truscott
	Dorothy Hayden Truscott's classic book on planning the play of the hand is back in print thanks to the folks at Master Point Press.
	$22.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Watson's Classic Book on the Play of the Hand at Bridge
	Louis Watson and Sam Fry
	First written in the 1930s and revised in 1962, this is still the classic book on declarer play. Part I covers all of the basic principles (how to establish a suit, the finesse, the hold-up play, the crossruff) while Part II expands on these with topics like how to choose which of two suits to establish and an introduction to elimination plays.
	$16.99		Available now and ready to ship

	Bridge at the Enigma Club
	Peter Winkler
	A novel that introduces the idea of encrypted bids and signals at the table. These high-powered conventions aren't legal in most live games, but they make for fascinating theory and a great mystery story!
	$18.95		Available now and ready to ship

	Matchpoints
	Kit Woolsey
	Kit Woolsey's classic collection of essays on how on how matchpoint bidding, play, and defense is different from rubber bridge and team games. Topics range from how to choose between 3NT and 4 of a major when you have an 8-card fit, to some controversial suggestions on how often to play Moysian fits. Updated and revised for the 21st century.
	$24.95		Available now and ready to ship

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Inventory last updated: 09-18-2023 16:19:50

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Books and Supplies

Bridge Books - Highly Recommended

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