Understanding the Uncontested Auction
by Ron Klinger and Andrew Kambites

Master Point Press, £11.50 (US $15.95), ISBN No. 1 894154 47 9

It doesn’t seem to happen often these days, but every now and then a hand comes along when amazingly the opposition leaves you alone to do your own thing – and this book is aimed at facing just those occasions. It is another book in the Master Bridge Series by those most prolific of writers, Klinger and Kambites, and could well be used as a reference book by any teacher.

After a short introduction in Chapter One on the different methods of hand evaluation available, the authors devote themselves to showing how to deal with balanced hands, and reinforce the well-known advice to bid balanced hands as balanced hands as soon as possible. Because of this they sensibly suggest that a balanced hand outside the no trump range with a four-card major and four-card minor should be opened with the major. (Why some people advocate the opposite has always seemed spurious to this reviewer.) Some sensible advice on how to start bidding unbalanced hands comes next, with particular reference to those awkward 4-4-4-1 hands.

The emphasis switches at this stage to examining the responder’s first action, and when he is in a position to support opener’s major the concepts of Splinter bids and the Jacoby 2NT response are introduced.

Everything you ever wanted to know about the uncontested auction is detailed in this book with some sensible stuff especially on Fourth Suit Forcing (FSF). The authors suggest that fourth suit at the one level (i.e. in the partnership auction 1 – 1 – 1 – 1) should be forcing but natural and that the sequence which starts 1 – 1 – 1 – 2 is equivalent to FSF, denying four spades but with at least a game-invitational type of hand. They stress, too, the importance of making sure both halves of the partnership understand exactly what is forcing and what is not, after responder has introduced the fourth suit, and the fact a lot of regular partnerships play FSF as forcing to game because of the possible misunderstandings which might occur.

This is a sensible book, written clearly, with lots of examples and it should appeal to all players who are trying to fine-tune their system. I can’t pretend it was the most riveting book I have ever reviewed because the subject matter is essentially dry, but in bridge as in all things you do not get very far without putting in the essential groundwork and the authors of Understanding the Uncontested Auction put you in the position to do that very well.

Dave Huggett

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