Bridge with Ron Klinger - Series 1 (DVDs)

£19.99 plus p&p from The Bridge Shop. Tel: 020 7486 8222

There are four DVDs in Series 1:

Opening Leads (1). The content is fairly basic and covers which card to lead from various holdings, and how to recognise the holding partner might have from their lead. It does not cover how to choose which suit to lead from the whole hand, depending on the bidding and contract; this will be covered in Series 2.

Tips on Bidding. This is a little more advanced and includes topics such as 'Opener's rebid priorities' and 'Responder's problems'. A possible downside for the Acol market is that some of the topics are based on the Strong No-trump and Five-card Majors.

Card Combinations for Declarer. This starts at a basic level, first covering the order in which to cash a suit (playing the honour from the short hand first), and not blocking a suit such as A-Q-6-4-3 opposite K-9-8-5. It moves on to more advanced aspects like 'Retaining the tenace', for example with K-Q-5-3 opposite A-9-6-2. Klinger uses whole deals to show when to augment or bend the rules, by counting the opposition's points or keeping the dangerous opponent off lead. He ends with some safety plays such as K-5 opposite A-10-9-4-3-2.

Improve Your Hand Valuation. This DVD is made up of ten tips. The first nine ('Useful Tens', 'Downgrade honours in suits where partner is short', etc.) take 45 minutes, and Klinger then spends 45 minutes on topic Number 10: the Losing Trick Count. If you have ever wondered how players get to game (and make it) with distributional combined 19-counts, then Klinger's exposition of LTC will help you. I do wish, though, that he had not included an example where 1 - 3 showed 13+ points and was game forcing.

As you would expect from such a famous author and teacher, the information is very well structured and clearly presented, with good examples. There are also lots of tests where you are given five seconds or so to come up with the answer.

However, I found the presentation style unexciting, with frequent head-shots of Klinger reading an auto-cue and only occasional glimpses of his personality. It seems that the DVDs have been created by copying old videos; the graphics are basic and the colours watery. The DVDs have been designed to be played on TVs; they don't contain any features that would benefit from being run on a PC. The DVD boxes each indicate a run time of 92 minutes, but only Improve your Hand Valuation runs that long. The other three run for about 70, 75 and 80 minutes respectively.

If you are more comfortable learning your bridge from DVDs than from books, then Improve your Hand Valuation and Card Combinations for Declarer both contain useful information that will improve your bidding and your play.

Simon Cochemé

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