Bridge for Dummies by Eddie Kantar

This book fills a yawning gap left wide open when the celebrated Audrey Grant textbook series chose in its beginning Club Series to ignore the basic system used by most ACBL members in favor of a system (1950's style Goren) which has been obsolete for two generations. The foundations of that basic system include 5-card majors, limit raises, a 15-17 HCP 1NT opening with Stayman and Jacoby transfers, weak two-bids with an artificial forcing 2C opening, and negative doubles. The Club Series ignores all of these except for 5-card majors and limit raises. Kantar includes all of them except for the negative double.

The other major deficiency in Grant's books is the use of an overly simplistic method of hand evaluation based on addiing distributional points for suit length (and for shortness when a fit has been found). Variations on this approach have been taught to beginners since Goren's day, but are rarely used by experts, who base their evaluation for suit contracts on winners, losers, and the favorable or unfavorable location of high cards. Kantar follows the Grant approach, although with a somewhat more sophisticated method than Grant's; and in his discussion of preemptive bidding he introduces a winner-counting technique which gives results equivalent to the Losing Trick Count method favored by this reviewer.

On the familiar one to ten scale, I give Grant a 10 on teaching method, a 2 on bidding system, and a 3 on hand evaluation, while Kantar gets 8's across the board in these areas. The main flaw in Kantar's book, and it's a big one, is in typography. Anyone who buys a bridge book has seen a newspaper bridge column and knows what a hand diagram is supposed to look like. Yet Kantar (or more likely, his publisher) insisted on using cutesy hand diagrams which include a picture of each card. These are difficult to read, and fail to prepare the reader for any followup reading of more advanced books. In addition, there were far too many typographical errors, which will tend to confuse beginners. If Kantar will junk the cutesy hand diagrams, add a chapter on negative doubles, and hire a bridge player to do the proof-reading, the next edition of this book would be a real winner. In its present form, I cannot recommend it.