Jul
09

Six Tricks

Whenever I pick up a new obsession, my first stop is the bookstore. Bridge was no different except notably in the number of books I’ve acquired on the subject. The first, and one of the best, was Eddie Kantar’s Bridge for Dummies. I moved on, still a dummy though, and read a number of other books as well. Apparently, writing bridge books is an occupation second only to playing bridge for many expert players; there are hundreds and hundreds of books on the subject. My collection is just the tip of the iceberg.

Recently Watson’s Play of the Hand at Bridgehad me missing Kantar and just about every other book I’d read on the subject (140 pages in I gave myself a break and have been assiduously avoiding it ever since). I carry the Watson with me and I know that without a steady partner now is the perfect time to work on my declarer play, but I just can’t bring myself to pick it up again. The impossible contracts which spring forth from my short term partnerships shall remain impossible for the time being.

Intimidated by Watson, the 335 pages I have left of his book and the foresight to know that when I do finish it I won’t have retained but a fraction of the content thus forcing me to read it over again … I’ve fled to greener pastures and this finds me reading Larry Cohen’s To Bid or Not to Bid at the moment.

One of the books highly recommended by my teacher was Dorothy Hayden Truscott’s Winning Declarer Play. I bought a copy of it relatively early on. Unfortunately, it is out-of-print and less computer savvy types have a hard time finding it. I’ve told a couple of people about used.addall.com which is my favorite source for hard to find books on any topic, including bridge. Still when collections of bridge books come up for sale on eBay the inclusion of Winning Declarer Play along with whatever other title I may be seeking is apt to push me toward buying the lot just so I have another copy to lend or give away. I sent one such copy on to a fellow bridge student and she was so pleased that she gave me lovely candle worth far more than the book, especially considering it had simply been included with a group of other books I was interested in.

I’d also give very high marks to Dan Romm’s Things Your Bridge Teacher Won’t Tell You, but whatever I might say about it couldn’t compare to the accolades implied by the fact someone actually walked off with it from the bridge club. Luckily that book isn’t out of print; I’ll have a harder time replacing the bookmark.

Jul
03

An Unconventional Skill

When one takes up the game of bridge there are a daunting number of things to learn and skills to develop. One of the beauties of the game is that it is a life-long endeavor (which is probably why they call it “Life Master” even if a few of us attempt to do it a bit quicker than that). In October of 2009 I attended my first regional tournament and had my first experience with something called “The Partnership Desk”. The partnership desk is a matchmaking service for bridge players. They take a person’s information and attempt to pair them with someone else so that they can play in an event together. This is no easy task at a tournament with the only information being a description of what system one plays and their number of master-points.

Master-point discrimination is rampant, I’ve heard stories of people with fifteen master-points refusing to play with those who have only five (both of these people would be considered rank beginners by almost anyone with more than say a hundred or so). The real issue isn’t how many points a person has, but how long it took to get them. I’d be nervous about playing at a tournament with someone who had the same number of points as me if it had taken them a decade to get them, but then again maybe they are an accomplished rubber bridge player who almost never plays in ACBL sanctioned events. I was lucky at that tournament to be paired with a couple of nice players and we fairly well. It became apparent to me while attending that tournament that while having the option of utilizing the partnership desk was important another solution was in order and that was social networking.

Social networking is not something I do naturally, but it is a skill needed for one to excel at this game. I had the foresight to create an e-mail address that was strictly for bridge use, but now I saw the necessity of getting the contact information for those people I played with (and against) that I seemed to gel with in some way so that later on when I was trying to find a partner for a tournament or put together a team for an event I could call on them.

My contact list for that e-mail address now contains not just e-mail addresses, but notes on where I met the individual and what sort of system they play. This paid off pretty quickly; in February of 2010 my regular partner at the time and I met up with two of the women I met at that aforementioned tournament at an out-of-state regional and we did pretty well playing in a K.O. event together. It is a bit amusing to me that this game which attracts a number of anti-social types requires one to network, but being able to do so pays off more than most conventions one might learn instead.