Books
There are thousands of book out there on contract bridge, of which duplicate bridge is a subset. Some of them are classics that have been around for decades. Watson’s The Play of the Hand at Bridge, for example, was first published in 1959 and often is cited as still the best thing ever written on the actual play of the hand. There also are blogs, websites, and various other resources in bewildering array.
Regrettably, the ACBL’s explanation of its own Laws of Duplicate Bridge is well nigh incomprehensible because of it’s structure, or the lack thereof. Every paragraph seems to either assume that you already know what is in every other paragraph or it sends you to somewhere else in the laws. You wind up with so many mental bookmarks that you lose your place and your train of thought. You have to read it iteratively and hope to pick up a little more each time around, much like the old IBM Job Control Language (JCL). In all fairness, the complexity of the material virtually prohibits straightforward linear exposition. The laws were written well before the advent of the hyperlink technology that lets us jump around so easily in a document today. Happily, there are many other sources of bridge information, some of which attempt to correct the ACBL’s expository shortcomings. The link below will take you to an excellent example.
Duplicate Bridge Rules Simplified 2017, by David Stevenson, gives us a much more readable version of the laws of duplicate bridge. It is a .pdf file that uses hyperlinks to jump back and forth within the text, which greatly improves readability. It is the only example this old mossback has personally seen where the digital copy on his screen is better that the hard copy in his hand. The link takes you directly to the fully functional document, which is indexed for quick look-ups. A great piece of work made available to us without charge. Thank you, Mr. Stevenson.
The best way to approach the great mass of material out there is through a good web browser. Here are a few examples of suggested search strings for sorting through those thousands of books and other resources. Note that they always specify either “contract” or “duplicate” or both; that keeps out links about actual physical bridges. Avoid searches that are too broad; “contract bridge” and “duplicate bridge” will produce more hits than you can deal with.
- classic contract bridge books
- classic duplicate bridge books
- duplicate bridge book reviews
- contract bridge book reviews
- contract bridge [fill in the blank]
- duplicate bridge [fill in the blank]
Like all internet searches, just decide what you want to know about and then devise a search string to find it. Curious about the “two-over-one-forcing” bidding system? Just put it in a search string to find books, blogs, websites, and articles about it.