Customer Reviews

The Complete Book on Overcalls at Contract Bridge: A Mike Lawrence Bridge Classic

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This comprehensive work on overcalls actually transcends the subject and gets near to the inner essence of bridge, as few other books do (Kelsey and Ottlik's Adventures in Card Play is another). The principles of what makes a good overcall vs bad ones are laid out in clear and linear fashion, such that the information can be put to IMMEDIATE use by the reader. Your game cannot fail to improve. Best of all, the author does not gild his ideas with contrived example hands constructed only to validate them. He honestly presents each recommendation in its best and worst light. Please buy this book! (and read it twice).

First the downside: Its a bit of work going through this book. This is not some light read, with lots of jokes. Expect to spend a lot of time thinking aabout whats going on given a bidding sequence, and your hand. You want to improve? You have to work at it!

The upside: This will really help you to understand not just overcalls, but hand evaluation, bidding, opening leads, defense, and what in general is going on. Who holds what, etc.


Its a study of whats going on in all 4 players hands, given the information of a single bid, or one round of bidding. Why, with the exact same hand, you can overcall with one sequence, and pass with the other. I spent a few weeks reading this, going over the hundreds of sequences and hands. I'm now more aware of certain lurking dangers, and what to look out for.

This book presents a superb, complete, and clear explanation of principles of overcalling and responding to overcalls. Lawrence provides many tabulations of slightly different hands and shows how to distinguish them to partner. Thorough discussion of differences between match-point and IMP strategy is included. Responsive doubles are explained clearly, and examples clarify the inferences available from NOT making a negative double. Complete explanations of when, why, how, and how high to preempt are provided. This book is addressed to players already competent, and will help raise their competitive bidding to expert level. Buy 2 copies and give your partner one. DON'T LET YOUR OPPONENTS READ IT!

Mike Lawrence must be a direct descendant of Sherlock Holmes! He uses every scrap of information available on any particular hand/auction, and uses these to arrive at the best bid to make. And it is because of this attention to detail that this (and his other books) are intended for those players in the intermediate or advanced category.

Interesting to place this book's approach alongside more modern bridge textbooks. Take the likes of Cohen's 'Law of Total Tricks'. It expounds the 'Law' and then illustrates how a player should use it via a modest selection of example hands. By contrast, Mike Lawrence bombards the reader with every conceivable hand and explains (albeit in logical order) how you should be thinking about these along the way.

This hardly SEEMS a sound teaching approach: the type is small, there is loads of repetition (Lawrence admits it), and the 'quizzes' at the end of each section are not organised in a 'reader-friendly' way.

But where this book succeeds and some modern books fail, is curiously in its insistence upon looking at each hand in a strictly individual way, as opposed to selling out to easy mnemonics or rules.

While more modern books (take one of Eddie Kantar's books on defence, which I also think are excellent) are nicely presented, contain witty 'after-dinner' asides, and have an interactive feel, their neatness sometimes makes me feel that bridge is all clearcut rules and decisions, hard for the beginner, easy for the expert.

But Mike Lawrence seems to be experiencing real pain on many of his example deals! You will frequently see him write, 'I don't know what to do with this hand', not because he's not a good player, but because he understands the difference, for a bridge player, between 'knowing the path' and 'walking the path'.

The writer of this book won't sit on his pedestal and lecture you with rules, he will walk the path WITH you. If you will take the time to let him lead you, it should prove time well spent.

This book is probably the best book on bridge ever written. There is so much insight in this book that you will have to re-read it time and time again each time adding to your own insight in not only overcalling but the game as a whole. The style is lucid sometimes nonchalant; Lawrence gives insight into his own considerations when making bidding decisions and makes it clear that many decisions are not absolute. But following the logic and type of arguments he presents you will get more and more decisions right. I strongly recommend this book to every bridge player who aspires to improve his or her game.

This classic book was long out of print, but has now been updated. And of course: it is a very good book. It is written in the typical Lawrence-style: not giving simple rules (overcall with 7-17 HCP and a 5card), but giving many example hands. At first this seems confusing, but you will learn that hand evaluation is much more than counting HCP.
Although Lawrence is very extensive, he is also pretty chaotic. For instance, the Michaels cuebid can found in a chapter on the overcaller's rebid. And the new updates have not been well integrated in the old text, but simply an extra chapter on modern methods has been added. And he is not complete: the weak jump overcall is not discussed, the takeout double is only somewhat discussed.
But is it a bad book? No, certainly not. You can read this book many times, and every time you will learn new things, which you will not have understood the first time. But if you are looking for a book that will introduce you to competetive bidding, you should better buy a book like '25 Ways to compete in the Bidding' by Seagram.

The original 1979 edition of of Mike Lawrences treatise on overcalls , transformed tournament bridge. One level four card overcalls, preemptive single jump raises, and cue-bids to show limit raises were introduced so well that they became standard to experts and intermediate players. (Marshall Miles, another important contemporary bridege theorist, also was an early expounent of four card overcalls, and has also been improving defensive bidding over the decades.) Lawrence, in the last few years, has concentrated on offensive bidding, takeout doubles, and other doubles. He neglected overcalls for thirty years, untill this new work.

Michael Lawrence has updated his Classic to the 21st century. In a new addition he adds the modern overcaluse of the jump cue response as a mixed raise, 2 nt jump iusually as a distributional limit raise, and broader use of the Respnsive and Snapdragon doubles.

The older text has been revised, with new material on Michaels Cue Bids and several special doubles.

As a long time collector of bridge books, I rate this as one of the best (Lawrence is my favorite author.) - possibly the most brilliant of Mike's many good books. It's a revised edition that was needed. Examples and explanations are almost as much fun to read/study as it is to play bridge.

The classic book on overcalls. Excellent advice on non-vulnerable overcalls at the one level and on which overcalls to avoid. Newer players might want to start with Edgar Kaplan's Competitive Bidding in Modern Bridge

Mike Lawrence is a very experienced author on duplicate bridge. He simplifies everything so that you can understand it. There is so much material on the subject matter but the key chapter is the chapter where he has updated the material to make it more conducive to today's bridge. I enjoyed this book very much but it is not one that you can read one time and put it away. You will be going over it for years to come!!