Bridge with Ron Klinger - Series 2 (DVDs)

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

There are four DVDs in Series 2:

Opening Leads (2). The Opening Leads (1) DVD told you what to lead from a suit (4th best, MUD, etc.). This DVD takes things a lot further, concentrating on which suit to lead. For example, what should you lead from K J752 Q643 K542 after the auction 1 - 4 ? Klinger's answer is the 2. Although there is a widely held belief that you shouldn't underlead a king, Klinger says that underleading a queen or a jack in such a situation is more likely to give the contract, but your king may still make a trick later in the hand. There you had minimal information from the bidding, but Klinger gives many good examples of selecting your lead after listening carefully to the bidding and making the right deductions.

Defensive Play. This covers the ground you would expect: strategy (through strength and round to weakness), third-in-hand plays (winning with the cheapest card possible, etc.), second hand plays (when to cover an honour, etc.). Klinger finishes with some examples of a more advanced topic, the surround switch, where you should play the ten holding K-10-8-5 and sitting over A-9-2 in dummy.

Signals and Discards. This is a clear exposition of the mix of tools a club player needs: attitude on partner's lead, count on declarer's or dummy's lead, attitude when discarding, with exceptions to all of the above when suit-preference signals should be used. I liked an early example of attitude on partner's lead: partner leads the ace, dummy has two small, what should you play from Q-8-2? Looking at the whole hand and not just your holding in the suit led, there will be times when the two is the right card.

Competitive Bidding. Klinger starts by describing when you should overcall and to what level. He uses an evaluation technique new to me, 'suit quality': a combination of suit length and the number of honours held in the suit. He goes on to cover take-out and responsive doubles. Weak, intermediate and strong jump overcalls are all included, allowing the viewer to select the option they wish.

As with Series 1, the information is very well structured and clearly presented, with good examples and lots of tests. The presentation style is as before and a little bland for my taste, despite the red bow-tie. The DVDs have been created by copying old videos; I would have liked to be able to use an index to jump to a particular section.

If you are happy to sit and watch rather than read a book, then these DVDs, particularly Opening Leads (2) and Signals and Discards could be of great benefit to club players who want to consolidate their knowledge in these areas and improve their results. Each of the DVDs runs for about 87 minutes and finishes with Klinger reminding you that bridge is a partnership game, and that your results will improve even more if you go out and buy a copy of the DVD for your partner. Now that's chutzpah!

Simon Cochemé

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