Countdown to Winning Bridge

by Tim Bourke, Marc Smith

"If you have been playing bridge without counting the hand, perhaps for years, you are about to enter a new world." Thus David Bird, in the foreword to the original edition of this book. Thousands of readers learned to improve their play from the book version, and now it is available in an interactive CDROM, using Fred Gitelman's state-of-the-art Bridge Base engine. The reader can play through every example himself, as many times as he wants, bringing an "at-the-table" feel to the learning process.

218 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1999

Reviews

[Conrad Timon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good

[Michael Kawalec · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Countdown to Winning Bridge" is a sound book for learning card counting techniques, but there is one fly in the ointment. In Chapter 6, the authors deviate from their card counting efforts into a disastrous attempt at probability theory. They conjure up something they call "The Monty Hall Trap" an idea based on an error in reasoning (they connect two independent events in their explaination), which in turn is used to justify an unhelpful idea they call "Biased Information". I recommend skipping their Chapter 6 and instead referring to "Bridge Odds for Practical Players" by Kelsey & Glauert for an excellent treatment of bridge probability theory.

[Monte Lamb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very good book that covers the subject on how to determine the opponents cards in Bridge. It starts off with some relatively easy examples and then progresses to more involved ways to do it. I will say that the subject is a difficult one and by the end of the book, it is very difficult to grasp the information, at least for me. However, it gives a great way to approach playing the cards to maximize your results.