The Golden Rules of Construcive Bidding
by Julian Pottage and Marc Smith

Master Bridge Series, £7.99, ISBN No. 0 304 36217 4

I am often asked, in my role as bridge teacher, to try and encapsulate the whole of bidding theory into a crib sheet or two of 'basic rules', and I have to say I find it very difficult. What I can now do of course is to refer my students to this latest offering by Pottage and Smith in the Golden Rules series.

Here they have listed eleven basic tenets, or rules if you like, which should be adhered to more often than not, and the reasons for so doing are carefully explained. Of course all rules are there to be broken and if that is the case the logic behind doing so is also detailed.

If I had to pick what I consider to be the most important ones, I would certainly choose Chapters Two and Three which are "Bid No-trumps as Soon as Possible with a Flat Hand," and "Support Partner whenever Possible." (In my experience newcomers to the game have most difficulty in these two areas.) A lot of the rules are pretty basic - although none the worse for that - but one or two are a little more esoteric. I particularly liked Rule Seven: "Pace the Auction." What the authors are saying here is that a rash decision early on can prove hard to rectify later, and this is well exemplified by the following example.

You hold:

7 4

K J 6

A Q 9 6 4

K 7 3

and hear partner open with 1. Over your 2 response he bids 2; what do you do now?

I bet you bid 3NT! If so disaster would strike as partner holds:

A K 9 6 5

Q 10 8 7 4

J 3

2

and it would be quite wrong for this hand to bid 4. Leaps to game are more or less saying: "This is the right spot, unless you have an exceptionally strange hand."

So the answer to the bidding problem posed above is to bid 3, the fourth suit, whereupon opener would rebid his hearts giving you an easy raise to game in that suit. I also liked "Be Conservative in the Slam Zone" and "Stay Low on a Misfit," which causes me to think of several people I might buy this book for . . .

The authors claim that this is a book for intermediate players, but I'm not sure I know exactly what that means anymore, and once or twice they couldn't resist mentioning some fairly advanced bidding notions which jarred slightly, given that a lot of the content is very fundamental indeed. Nevertheless, the book is well written and explains clearly the logic behind doing what you have to do, which is so very important. I would think that most players would benefit from reading this book.

Dave Huggett

© Bridge Plus 1999-2006