A four-lesson course on declarer play designed for true beginners. If your students are ready to get more serious about their declarer play, this course is the perfect 'how to' guide. Students will find that it is surprisingly easy to: * Count winning and losing tricks. * Master three basic techniques for eliminating losers. * Manage entries. * Set priorities. What to do first, second, and so on? * Plan the play. This Teacher's Manual will make your job easy. It's a virtual script for the four lessons found in Playing a Bridge Hand: Just the Basics, and includes table-top examples and practice deals for students.

Are you a lucky player ? It is no co-incidence that the best players are lucky players. You can become a "better" player by improving your bidding system with your partner and by improving your play technique, however this will not make you a lucky player. How can you become a lucky player and a winner? In this book, illustrated with hands from actual play, the author demonstrates how to become a lucky player. Lucky players evaluate their trick winning potential, recognise and grab opportunities, maximizing their score over all the likely distributions of the cards.

An amusing, lighthearted examination of the crazy world of rubber and duplicate bridge, and the men and women who populate that strange milieu - with a heavy but hilarious accen on the tricks and ploys employed by dedicated bridge fiends to win games, master points, and/or money.

This book is all about learning to play and enjoy the game of bridge. The bridge book is an introduction to the most popular bridge system played in the United States today. The system is called Two-Over-One (2/1). The book is for serious beginners and includes many of the conventional bids used by players around the world. All phases of the world's greatest card game are included, You will learn to bid accurately, play like a pro, and defend like a champion. Learning to play bridge will provide years of enjoyment in a social atmosphere where fun, competition, and individual challenge are all in play.

Getting to good games, slams, and staying out of poor contracts is an important aspect of bridge. The best way to improve your bidding is not to add a new convention but to improve your hand evaluation skills.

In Mastering Hand Evaluation: Understanding the Principles of Partnership Bidding you will learn about the science of hand evaluation, going far beyond 4-3-2-1 high card points. Enhance your ability to recognize good cards and discover the magic of the 30-point deck. Popular point count and losing trick count methods are examined and tested with a database of over 121,000 hands from championship play as well as practice matches with at least one world champion at the table. Improvements to the best methods are introduced based on the results.

When should you invite on the way to 3NT? When there is a known fit, how many losers does partner have for his 1NT opening? Based on the modified New Losing Trick Count, how many losers do you need to start a slam investigation if partner may have more than minimum values? When you learn the answers to these questions and apply the techniques, your partnership communication skills will improve dramatically.

Hand evaluation is not simply a personal skill. If you and your partner study these techniques together, you will both be on the same wavelength. Your new-found ability to have an intelligent conversation during the auction will lead to better bridge results.

Lawrence Diamond is a Gold Life Master with multiple Bracket 1 and Flight A wins. In 2014, he ranked 265th on the Barry Crane Top 500 list.

The same authors' previous book, 'Declarer Play at Bridge: a Quizbook', was named the 2013 Book of the Year by the American Bridge Teachers' Association. Building on the success of that title, this book gives the near-beginner a chance to practise the principles on which sound bidding is based, from the opening bid onward. This is not just a series of problems, however. Each section contains a brief introduction to its topic, and the ideas are reinforced with carefully explained solutions and helpful tips throughout.

Why are the world's top players so successful? They make very few basic mistakes! Players at a less exalted level often make the same mistakes over and over again throughout their bridge careers. In this book you will see 52 of the most frequent mistakes - in bidding, play and defense.

The chapter on each mistake will contain several deals where the original player went wrong. It will end with some tips, to help you avoid making such errors yourself. In the first section, Mistakes in the Bidding, the author has used deals from high-level tournament play, including world championships. The cardplay and the defense in such events are usually excellent but it's amazing how often experts surprise the kibitzers with a bid or call that seems to be a clear mistake. Experts make such errors less often than the rest of us but you will find it instructive to look at these wayward decisions. Try to analyze why the bid was wrong before reading the author's thoughts on the matter. When it comes to declarer play and defense, expert mistakes are rarer. These errors will be illustrated with constructed deals, or examples from a lower level of play.

Every time you eradicate one of these 52 common mistakes from your game, your results will improve. Avoid all of them and... who knows what may happen?

Learn the basics of Cross-ruffing, Endplays, Squeezes and Double Squeezes.

Workbook 1 is 30 hands to practice opening bids at the 1 level in major suits, minor suits, and no trump. Includes examples of distributional hands worthy of opening with lighter values. Workbook 2 is 80 hands to practice responding to 1 level opening bids in a suit - 20 consecutive hands for each suit open.

Your first steps in learning the techniques and mechanics of playing a bridge hand. Trumping, finessing, cross-trumping and establishing a long suit are some of the techniques you will learn.