Declarer Play - CD Rom by DaBriSoft

£55 from www.hiltonproperty.co.uk/BRIDGE/

Is your declarer play up to scratch? Do you ever find partner looking at you in that certain way after you have failed to make a contract that you knew was 'cold'?

If the answers to these questions are 'no' and 'yes' respectively, then you could do worse than invest in this new bridge software by DaBriSoft. It's all about declarer play and once you have installed the application you are given the option of loading one of four different programs from which you can choose to play match-points (pairs scoring) or IMPs (teams scoring). You can choose to play in a suit contract or you can choose to play in no-trumps, and you can select the difficulty of the deal on which you want to test yourself.

At the end of each deal there is a summary telling you what you should have done (in the event that you have done something wrong), and you can see your result compared with eleven other players, plus your current position in the 'tournament'- a tournament consisting of 33 deals. There are five tournaments per program, so that makes a grand total of 660 deals. You have no say in the bidding but are given it as a fait accompli. All you have to do is find the correct line of play.
So what are the deals like? Well, the easy ones are pretty easy for anyone with experience but the more difficult ones are very good indeed. Take this one, for example:

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

You are in 4 and a low spade is led to East's king. What do you do?

On a good day you would make thirteen tricks by going up with your ace, but consider the case where the A is over the king and East has the Q-x-x, with trumps breaking 3-2. The correct play is to duck the K!

What can East do? If he returns a spade you ruff in dummy, draw trumps and play a club to the ten and the contract is secure.

If you win the opening lead, play two rounds of trumps and then finesse a club, you will find East winning to give a club ruff to his partner, who returns the Q. (If you wonder how I know all that, yes - it's because I got it wrong!)

I thought this software was pretty good. It is easy to use, requires only Windows 95 or higher, and is fast. You can try out a demonstration version at www.hiltonproperty.co.uk/BRIDGE/. Some of the deals may be a bit easy for the expert, but for the average player it is a clever piece of work. Recommended.

Dave Huggett

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