Bridge is Fun
by Ron Klinger

Cassell / Peter Crawley, £8.99, ISBN 0 304 36668 4

Ron Klinger's latest offering comprises a collection of eighty problems, covering constructive bidding, competitive bidding, opening leads, defence and declarer play. The author recommends studying a few problems at a time as a good way to warm up for a game of bridge, and I think the book meets this stated objective well. Generally, he presents a group of about four problems and answers at a time, which allows you to read the book in small sections and saves you from having to search for the solution.

Klinger has selected the problems from recent tournaments and this makes them both realistic and new. The 'fun' element consists of two parts. Firstly, if the players at the table get things wrong, you can laugh at the silly results they achieved. Secondly, any excessive blank space on a page is filled with an amusing snippet. Here is an example:

As you may be aware, so-called experts tend to play a wider variety of conventions than average players (at any rate those in Australia seem to) and I liked the fact that the author has avoided using names to describe the conventions. My one quibble concerns the degree of explanation given as regards the bidding. Except in a couple of places when an explanation was missing altogether, Klinger has given the level of detail that you would see if you glanced at an opponent's convention card. Particularly given that the main target audience for the book is intermediate-level players, it would have been more helpful, and made the problems easier to solve, if the author had sometimes given the level of detail that you would get in reply to a question.

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

South opens 1, North responds 1, South rebids 2NT (18-19) and North raises to 3NT. You, West, lead the 5 and partner's ten loses to the queen.

Declarer leads the 4 to dummy's queen and East discards the 8 (high discouraging). This is followed by the 3 to East's 7 (high discouraging again), South's king and your ace. What do you lead next?

There are two clues here to the winning action. Firstly, partner has discouraged both red suits, so there is little merit in trying to find an entry in one of those suits for a lead through South's
K. Secondly, why would declarer win the first trick with the Q, gratuitously telling you about the location of both spade honours? The solution is simple: South has king-queen doubleton, so lay down the A.

Julian Pottage

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