We love bridge books and have read hundreds of them. Our favorite bridge books feature outrageous swindles, cheeky bids that produced great results, and exotic endplays — deals that are great fun but that don’t frequently happen at the table. In fact, we suspect that many of our favorite deals never occurred at any table, existing only in the authors’ fertile imaginations.
Our publications include deals that are great fun, but we created this material to help you win more often at bridge. Our material is based on several years of research, covering deals in which players like you made technically correct bids and plays that produced good scores in real-world bridge – not in the Bermuda Bowl, but in the sorts of games in which you play most of your bridge. You’ll have fun, and you’ll also win more frequently.
Starting late in 2017, Charlie started writing a summary, twice a month, highlighting interesting deals he saw at the table. Then and now, most of Charlie’s bridge is played with intermediate and advanced partners, at matchpoints. Initially, the summaries covered deals where Charlie noticed particularly good or bad bids or plays from anyone at the table. Over time, the focus shifted to deals on which lots of matchpoints were won and lost across the field. In a typical month, the deal summaries cover 75 to 100 deals.
Back in 2017, Charlie’s bridge included some online play, mostly on BBO, but after face-to-face bridge clubs shut down in the spring of 2020, Charlie (like many other bridge enthusiasts) switched completely to online bridge and was impressed by the additional information that was available in very large games (typically 50+ tables). One advantage was that one or two outrageous results had relatively little impact on the matchpoint scores; another was that it was possible to identify accurately the types of decisions that won and lost lots of matchpoints across a large field.
Starting in mid-2020, the deal summaries developed into a collection of situations in which lots of matchpoints were won and lost, by typical players rather than by experts. The summaries currently cover over 2500 such situations.
These are the situations that you need to study, in order to get better at bridge.