Review 173, Things Your Bridge Teacher Won't Tell You, Dave Huggett

Reviews

Things Your Bridge Teacher Won't Tell You
by Dan Romm

Master Point Press, £11 plus p&p from The Bridge Shop. Tel: 020 7486 8222

It's always fun to read new bridge books but increasingly authors are finding it more difficult to come up with new material. This book - by someone who, I must confess, is a new name to me - puts at least some of that right. Being a teacher myself, I was intrigued by the title and was keen to know what I had been missing out on all these years, and was expecting to be chastened at least a little - and perhaps I am.

Dan Romm is, apparently, a highly successful rubber bridge player living in Seattle and he has - er - highly individual views on various aspects of the game, with regard to bidding, play, and defence. He starts off by asking: 'What makes an expert?' and theorises that this can be compartmentalised into five categories: Psychology, Planning, Technique, Adaptability and Judgement. Nothing too much there other than common sense, I felt, but when it got to the chapters on what he calls 'tips', things started to hot up and Romm's own particular idiosyncrasies became apparent. He doesn't like Negative Doubles, for instance, although I am not quite sure why. I think it's because he likes to make loads of low-level penalty doubles - but, of course, the two things aren't mutually exclusive. He is averse to too much signalling during the play - and quite right too - but what really caught my imagination, and made me think, was his idea that you shouldn't try to make one bid do too much. Here is an example from real life.

	A x x J x x x x x J x x x
K Q J 10 x A K x x x - A K x		x x Q 10 x x x x x x Q x x
	x x x x A K Q J x x x x x

After a weak (!) 2 bid by South, West bid 4, which in his methods showed a strong hand with both majors. East naturally bid 4 but now West had no idea if his partner even had a four-card suit and passed, and the easy slam was missed. Romm argues that West should bid 3 over 2 , ostensibly asking for a diamond stop for no-trumps, and when East responds 3 , he can follow up with 4 showing a hand too strong to make that bid originally. If East bids 3NT, West should still follow up with 4.

The last part of the book deals with bidding conventions which Romm either likes or hates, but about which he at least has strong views. He likes his own version of Drury, for example - which I think is the worst convention ever. (Fancy having a bid to see if partner had a real bid in the first place.) But he hates Support Doubles - probably because they take away the ability to punish the opposition for their intervention.

So did I like this book? I hated parts of it. I hated the fact that the author seemed to be the best player in the world, and I hated the fact that he used 'x's instead of spot cards. And I really disliked the fact that he felt compelled to tell us the names of the people he did all his clever things against. I mean, who cares?

But then I loved some of it too. I loved the fact that Romm is clearly passionate about the game, and I loved some of the new ways he recommended that you look at a problem. So, if you are prepared to put up with a lot of self-aggrandisement, then go ahead and read this. It is definitely food for thought.

Dave Huggett