Library / Personal
Contract bridge
Bidding systems, play technique, the classics.
Why this shelf
The best-designed information problem I know of, and the literature is unusually well written for a games shelf.
Book
Watson on the Play of the Hand at Contract Bridge — Louis H. Watson, 1934
Ninety years old and still the clearest teaching of card play. Proof that a good explanation does not date the way a good system does.
Best door inBook
Why You Lose at Bridge — S. J. Simon, 1945
Funny, and about psychology rather than technique — how to win with the partner you have rather than the one you want. The best door in on this shelf by a distance.
Book
Reese on Play — Terence Reese, 1947
Reese thinks on the page. Following his reasoning taught me more than memorising any of his conclusions.
Book
Card Play Technique — Victor Mollo & Nico Gardener, 1955
The systematic treatment of technique. Where I go when I want to fix a specific hole rather than read for pleasure.
Book
The Expert Game — Terence Reese, 1960
On inference — what the bidding and the play have already told you if you were listening. The hardest and most rewarding thing here.
Book
Killing Defence at Bridge — Hugh Kelsey, 1966
Defence is half the game and gets a fraction of the attention. Kelsey corrects that with the most demanding problems on the shelf.
Book
Adventures in Card Play — Géza Ottlik & Hugh Kelsey, 1979
Strange, beautiful, and largely impractical. I keep it for the same reason I keep books of chess endgame studies — it shows what the game can do.
Book
To Bid or Not to Bid — Larry Cohen, 1992
One idea, the Law of Total Tricks, examined until it breaks. The examination of where it fails is better than the rule itself.
Rules
How this shelf is kept
- Nothing is here because it is famous. Several famous things are deliberately absent.
- Every entry carries one line in my own words on why it matters. No publisher blurbs.
- Every shelf names its best door in for a newcomer.
- Anything superseded is removed, not archived.