Suit Contracts
by Brian Senior

D & B Publishing, £11.20 (inc p&p from the Mr Bridge Mail Order Service), ISBN 1 904468 01 2

This is the second D & B book I have been asked to review - the complement to Bird's No-Trump Contracts (review on previous page) - and I am gratified to say that it is of the same high quality as its companion. The author, Brian Senior, is an accomplished player and writer of long-standing, and he has the happy knack of being able to present things clearly. Suit contracts, of course, pose questions of their own, and it is these questions that Senior has answered in a series of ten chapters with well thought-out chapter headings.

Like its companion book, the subject matter grows progressively more difficult as things go on, but all the usual suspects are there, including ideas on the question that every newcomer to the game asks: "How do I know whether to draw trumps or not?"

In the chapter entitled "Knowing the Odds and Combining Chances", you are asked what is the best way to manage 6 on the following layout:

J 8   6 5 4 2   J 6 3   A Q J 7   A Q 10 9 6   A K Q J 9   A   8 2

West leads the 10 and you pull trumps in three rounds. Do you take the club finesse, or the spade finesse, or both?

"Both, of course," I hear you say - but that would be entirely wrong, for you should take no finesse at all. Simply concede a spade to the king and discard three clubs from dummy on your remaining spade winners, ruffing your second club with dummy's last trump. I hope you got that right. (I like that problem because it highlights how wrong it always is to play on auto-pilot.)

Suit combinations and safety plays, card reading and avoidance plays, they are all there, explained in much detail but clearly too, and there are loads of examples throughout. Each chapter ends with a summary of the main points followed by a lot of 'do it yourself' problems - with the answers provided, naturally.

The final chapter on squeeze play was the only one that I felt slightly unhappy with, just because it was quite short and gave little information on how to recognise and set up a potential squeeze.

That quibble aside, I thought the book was excellent. It is probably harder than the Bird stablemate but offers great rewards for diligent application.

It is certainly a book I would recommend to my more receptive students.

Dave Huggett

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