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Test Your Bidding Against the Experts |
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Danny Roth |
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$15.95 |
204 pp. (paper) |
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Introduction
Are you feeling thoroughly fed up? You go to your regular club
duplicate, week after week, and wait for the result at the end,
only to hear the tournament director read out a list of winners'
names in which yours is conspicuously absent.
Well, it is long overdue that you do something about it! The
purpose of this book is to help you eliminate many of the basic errors
that, over many years, I have seen being committed by everybody
from beginners to world champions. It is a great mistake to
think that those at the top are the nearest objects to gods on
Earth. World champions have reached that status for no other reason
that their mistakes tend to be fewer and less serious than
those of the rest of us. I well remember a current multiple world
champion appearing on television and admitting that he is a terrible
bridge player. Let's give him full credit for his modesty, but is
he so far wrong? He has dominated world bridge over the past
couple of decades for no other reason that he is not quite as terrible
as the rest of us. As he proceeded to play a series in front of the
television cameras, I lost count of the number of very basic mistakes.
It was almost embarrassing!
I have improved my game over the years after coming in for
some scathing and well-deserved criticism and learning from my mistakes. I cannot claim to be at the top of the world and am not
considered to be even in the top flight, but in one respect, I feel
the situation is different, and that is the factor of memory. I claim
no credit for this, but I was born with a phenomenal memory, notably
for figures. I can reproduce lists of names, addresses, telephone
numbers, and similar details from 50 or more years ago as
though I had been told them just now. This, of course, has been invaluable
when it comes to bridge hands. Naturally, these particularly
interest me and my memory is therefore all the stronger in
this area. Although I cannot give outright proof, if there is anybody
in the history of the game who can beat me in this respect, I
should be very surprised.
For this reason, I believe I can claim to have collected a series
of hands where players of all standards have consistently
found difficulty, and while one cannot be right all the time, the
probabilities involved have been heavily in my favor. For this reason,
I feel justified in questioning advice given by players rated far
higher than myself. I leave you to judge whether I have made a
satisfactory case.
As far as scoring is concerned, there are three basic methods
for duplicate: pairs, teams (IMP or, on rare occasions, aggregate),
and point-a-board, the last effectively being pairs on two tables.
I am not intending to make this book into an extravaganza on
the differences between the various methods. Where they apply, I
shall certainly mention them, but the vast majority of mistakes I
intend to discuss are applicable to all methods.
A number of problems in this book are orientated towards
pairs play, and I must make an important point on general ethics
as it applies to this method of scoring. Most people take the view
that, in teams' events, they are responsible to their partner and
teammates, i.e., the other three members of the team. At pairs'
events, it is just one person, the partner. I want to stress most
strongly that this is not the case. Suppose you are sitting North-
South. You would be very pleased if, save for the round when they
are at your table, pairs sitting East-West played well to give your
rival North-South pairs poor results, thereby making yours look
good. Effectively, therefore--and this is what very few people realize--
the East-West pairs are your teammates for almost the entire evening. They therefore have a duty to you, and similarly you
have a duty to them. A number of articles and books have been
written giving example hands where one can go for tops by playing
anti-percentage bridge based on what you reckon is going on
at other tables. It is called shooting, and I strongly urge you not
to have anything to do with it. A lot of people try to win events
where they are doing quite well but not well enough by 㳨ooting䍊late in the evening. Others who are clearly doing badly, start similar
messing about, caring little or nothing about results.
Not only is this bad bridge, but, to my mind, it is grossly unethical.
To look at it from the reciprocal point of view, if you were
doing well in a pairs' event, you would, with full justification, bitterly
resent it if East-West pairs at other tables were shooting
and, most of the time, presenting your rival North-South pairs
with good results to leave you with undeserved bad ones. So
make up your mind that your only interest is sensible bridge, and
rest assured the results will look after themselves.
There is no need to repeat verbatim the points I made in my
latest book on the subject, Focus on Bidding. However, one basic
comment is worth emphasizing. Just as with clothes, music, architecture,
and countless other interests, there are fashions in
bridge. In recent years, the trend has been very much towards aggression,
in that opening bids, pre-empts, overcalls, and competitive
bidding generally have tended to become lighter. You constantly
hear comments like:
"It's a bidder's game."
"Bridge is all about bidding; not about passing."
"Get into the bidding whenever you can."
"Winners of pairs' contests tend to be declaring, rather than
defending most of the hands."
Really?!
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There are a number of areas in which
players of all standards have demonstrated room for improvement
in bidding, and the chapters in Test I will be structured accordingly,
bearing in mind that there will obviously be a fair
amount of overlap between the topics:
1) Making the effort to ensure that the right contract is reached
and particularly refraining from taking a unilateral decision
without sufficient consultation with partner.
2) Paying far more attention to the consideration of final contract
when constructing a bidding sequence.
3) Appreciating the quality (or the lack of it) of a hand in the light
of the auction progressing around it, i.e., being more flexible
and therefore more accurate in hand valuation.
4) Deciding when it is or is not appropriate to pre-empt.
5) Giving partner sufficient information to help him handle
competitive situations.
6) In conjunction with competitive auctions, deciding when to
pass, double, or compete.
In Test II, we shall review what we have learned in problem
sets that will include examples from Test I as well as other subjects,
notably looking ahead and appreciating what to do in awkward
situations, preferably well before they arise. In this connection,
we shall do a fair amount of work on the travance (trance in
advance) principle, which I introduced in Focus on Bidding.
Thus, in the chapters that follow, you will need to try to recognize
which type of problem is being illustrated and show how
to handle it. My most important requirement is that you should
understand what you are doing rather than make a bid because
㳯me expert told you to do so. In all three branches of the game
and at all standards, understanding represents the difference between
the winning and the losing player. Notwithstanding the
roaring (sorry, squawking) successes of the one famous fictitious
example, parrots have little or no chance in the long term.
Each chapter will start with a group of 10 bidding problems.
The problems will then be repeated with a discussion of my
recommended answers. I shall suggest grades on a scale of 1 to 10
for each (you do not have to agree and probably will not!) so that
you can assess how you are progressing through the book. Feel
free to enter your scores on the score sheet on page 4. In the
problem sets in Test II, you will hopefully score better, having
benefited from what you have read so far.
I stress again that by no stretch of the imagination do I insist
that what I say is categorically correct. While, in play and defense,
one can very often give demonstrably provable answers, bidding is
very much a question of judgment (even forgetting the elements of
style and system), and there is almost always scope for difference
of opinion. You need look no further than magazine bidding competitions
for proof. Experts can give and justify up to half a dozen
different answers to the same problem. However, I think you will
be able to see how to arrive at solutions that likely would have
earned rewards far improved on what actually happened.
In each case, you will be told where you are sitting and the
conditions of play; any relevant conventional bidding and other
information will be clearly explained. Assume that everything is
natural otherwise. Enjoy your journey! will be hard but hopefully
rewarding work! Assume that it is IMP teams scoring unless
otherwise stated.