Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Still the best bridge book I have ever read., August 24, 1998
By A Customer
Written long ago, but by no means out of date, this book describes the major ways that average players achieve less than they could.The first half of the book describes common technical errors and how to learn to avoid them: the second half describes common personality types and how to minimize their destructiveness as your partner. At the end is the reproduction of a rubber in which many common mistakes were made. The book is a wonderful combination of instruction and humour.
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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Best Advice on Becoming a Better Partner, June 12, 2002
S. J. Simon's Why You Lose at Bridge remains (since its original 1945 publication) the best text on improving one's partnership available anywhere at any price. Read it. Practice what you learned. Watch your partnerships improve. Read it, again ...If you have a standing partnership, read it together. Even the most capable professionals may well (re)discover ways to improve their game as they absorb Simon's words of wisdom. Improve your partnership, and your game improves. Simon sez ...
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book proves "unlearning" as important as learning for any bridge player, April 26, 2008
The bridge-bidder's arsenal is usually full of "gadgets": non-literal bids meant to convey or suggest information that might escape the normal bidding sequence. Even by the time this 1940s book appeared, "scientific" systems by leading bridge "experts" were all the rage. Who would disagree with scientific "experts"? After all, you can't fight progress.
WHY YOU LOSE AT BRIDGE dares to differ. S.J. Simon, author of this enduring little volume, shows us the genuine odds behind competitive bidding and play and explains things the highly regarded experts of his day didn't know -- or didn't want us to know.
[Note: the following two grafs assume some bridge experience.]
Would you almost automatically double a competitor's bid of "Six Spades" (12 of the 13 card tricks) if you had two "quick tricks" in your hand? Think about it, Simon warns. If the opponents have even a one-in-three chance of winning, your unthinking double will give them between four and six times the number of points for making contract considering vulnerability. Besides, when they hear your double the declarer will figure you for the two Aces and act accordingly. Watch out for the sure things that really aren't.
And sometimes (usually, the author implies) the scientific gadgets aren't worth it. At one tourney, following tortuous symbolic bidding, one partnership came to a contract of four spades and went down one. How had the author and his partner bid that "impossible" hand? Like this: South - 1 NT; North - 3 NT. Simple and literal.
After offering a bracing immersion in what I all "unlearning," Simon spends the second half of the book on the psychology of bridge, starting with the times a partner or opponent starts what he calls "trancing" -- mulling things over. Chapter Eleven, "The Logic of Luck," typically illustrates Simon's curmudgeonly attitude. We could almost blame him for the high-British-arch tone of his writing, except that he is always right!
WHY YOU LOSE AT BRIDGE is a tremendous book for bridge beginners, perhaps even more so for intermediates and even the more experienced players trying to cope with a new partner. Of course, this WAS the 1940s so the author assumes that major suits (Hearts and Spades) can be bid upon with only four of them in hand as opposed to today's more prevalent "five-card major" approach. And I have to wonder what Simon would make of today's bidding in general.
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