Customer Reviews

To Bid or Not to Bid

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Before reading this: I open 1 Spade, 2 Heart overcall,
partner raises to 2S, RHO raises to 3 Hearts. I auto-
matically bid 3S, just as Pavlov's dog automatically
salivated. Down one. 3H would have gone down one.
Oops. Wrong guess. Sorry, partner. Next round, I
pass 3H and it makes. 3S would have made. Oops.
Wrong guess. Sorry, partner.
After reading this: I look less at how many high-card
points I have and more at how many hearts and spades I
have. Do I have S Q9542 H QJ7 or S KQJ92 H 432? Do I
have 5 or 6 spades? Now I bid 3 Spades when it's right
and pass when it's right.
Buy two copies and give your partner one. Hide it from
all opponents. The IMPs will now dribble to your team,
five or six IMPs at a time. Likewise, so will the
matchpoints: 9x on 12 top instead of 2x on 12 top, again
and again on these unspectacular hands.

If your bridge library were extremely small, one MUST item would be The Law of Total Tricks. It's a gem, one that will change the way you think at bridge and one that will help you make those tough part-score and higher competitive decisions which are ordinarily such "guess work". This book will help you evaluate your bidding options with much greater assurance and accuracy.

The law of total tricks has been around for about 40 years, but it's never been as thoroughly and completely explained as in this book. Cohen shows how the law should be used to resolve your competitive bidding decisions and to make the opponents' life more difficult. He also shows how modern bidding, and how the conventions he developed with Marty Bergen, try to give your partnership the information you need to make total trick decisions. Simply the best book on the subject.

I don't understand how anyone could intelligently win a matchpoint game without understanding the LAW. This isn't just a way of improving your competitive bidding; the LAW is the whole theory underlying this area of bridge.

The author's presentation of the concepts is illustrated with numerous examples and exercises to allow the reader to quickly absorb the ideas. My advice to my partners: know this book inside out. My request of my opponents: pay no attention!

A familiarity with "The Law" will help you make the right competitive decision more often at the table. I recommend this book to any player interested in winning more of those partscore battles.

Just don't fall into the trap of obeying "The Law" blindly (as many players do). It's intended to be a useful guideline that can *improve* your judgement: it isn't meant to *replace* your judgement.

This excellent bridge book has the fine reputation that it does because it is so thorough and detailed an explanation of the Law of Total Tricks. Larry Cohen is the most passionate supporter of this law in the game; and he does a complete job explaining it, illustrating it with interesting example hands, and summarizing with useful maxims that tend to stick with you after the reading is over. Especially good is his compelling discussion of whether to rebid when the bidding goes 1H-1S-2H-2S-? or even 1H-1S-2H-2S-3H-?. He also makes some good points about bidding at the higher levels with a known long fit.

This is one of the few books we believe should be in every serious player's library; yet it is basic enough and entertaining enough to benefit relative beginners and more expert players alike. No wonder it is an award winning book on bridge!

Good partnerships will have sophisticated mechanisms for finding the right contract when given free rein of the bidding, but in reality the majority of bridge hands lead to competitive auctions. With each side interfering with the other, the situation suddenly becomes much less clear. After reading this book, you will no longer have to rely completely on mere guesswork and intuition to decide whether to bid or not to bid.

Larry Cohen introduces and expounds upon the Law of Total Tricks, a single principle which will allow you to estimate the possible scores resulting from almost any competitive auction. He describes some of the corollaries of the Law, as well as some good conventions that make use of the Law. These will improve the game of anybody not already familiar with such maxims as "bid to the number of trump your side has" and "when in doubt bid four spades over four hearts."

Even so, this book feels somehow incomplete. It does a good job of conveying the basic idea of the Law, giving examples of its application in relatively straightforward situations. But only in the last two chapters does Cohen begin to describe the adjustments that must be made in situations where the Law is not completely accurate. Furthermore, he doesn't really cover what to do in situations where the Law predicts ambiguous results: when bidding on might produce a better or worse result than passing, depending on the play of the hand. In these cases Cohen leaves us once again to guesswork and intuition.

Despite these faults, this book is essential because it does at least reduce the amount of guesswork to which the bridge player must resort in contested auctions.

Required reading for any good player. This book will help you to decide how high to bid in competitive auctions. This 1992 Bridge Book of the Year is the best-selling bridge book of the 1990's.

this TO BID OR NOT TO BID. It's hard to think of a wittier and more engaging book -- especially on a technique of bridge bidding (The Law of Total Trumps) that has been controversial since the 1950s if not earlier. Author Larry Cohen usually refers to this as the LAW -- all caps -- a signal he is ready to plead a fine case for adopting this outlook.

Indeed, this book was first published in 1992 and is still going strong. Cohen studs his witty-but-patient prose with actual nuggets of reality -- generally Life Masters playing for IMP's (Int'l Match Points) in the highest-level championships. And he shows the best of the best going DOWN on relatively routine hands in which the The Law of Total Trumps would have dictated a much happier outcome.

I myself haven't had an opportunity to use The Law of Total Trumps at duplicate. And I must stress that Cohen's "LAW" will absolutely not spare the bridge beginner the fundamentals of point count, distribution, overcalls and the like. In fact, s/he had better be comfortable with these guidelines because invoking the LAW draws on all one's experience with learning (or inferring by estimate) not only how much trumps partner and I have, but the same for the opposing team.

This is a really juicy book to sink your teeth into. I recommend it highly.

This is an essential book for any serious player. The only concern is that the intermediate player may come to believe that this is a substitute for judgement. Still this should improve the competitive bidding decisions for any player who is somehow not familiar with "The Law".

Those interested in a somewhat different valuation style should look into losing trick count originally popularized in Britain which has been around for some time.