All titles available from Master Point Press

Winner of the 2020 IBPA Book of the Year Award. Bridge players spend countless hours working on bidding conventions and cardplay techniques, yet give little attention to the mental side of the game. Maintaining focus and concentration, dealing with nerves, and other issues are largely ignored. In this book, Kim Frazer—an Olympian, winner of gold medals at three consecutive Commonwealth Games and an Australian international bridge player—has adapted the mental techniques that brought her success in shooting and explains in easily-understood terms how to use these at the bridge table. Just like Kim’s sport of target shooting, a loss of concentration in a bridge event can cost you a win. No matter your standard and irrespective of whether your errors are caused by distractions, nerves or other non-technical factors, this book offers simple, practical techniques to improve your mental approach to the game, allowing you to enjoy your time at the bridge table even more. "I am anxious to try out these new ideas and incorporate them as part of my regular regime. I can’t wait for my next bridge game! I would just like to bar all of my regular opponents from reading this book." -- Ron Klinger

• Award Winner

Nobody wants to lose at contract bridge. This book will show you how to win. Whether you're an advanced beginner, an intermediate or an advanced player, this valuable book can help you win more frequently and gain greater personal satisfaction from contract bridge. This is a book on the play of hands, full of wise counsel; it will entertain experts and help them teach others. The best way to count — side suits as well as trumps. How to draw inferences from your opponents' bids and plays. Opening leads — and traps. Placing the cards; playing the cards. The secrets of improving communication with your partner. "Anyone who hasn’t improved his bridge play after reading this book isn’t really trying." -Jim Jacoby "A delight." -Charles Goren "Kantar teaches, Stanley learns, and the reader has a ball." -Oswald Jacoby "An amusing way to learn better card play." -Edgar Kaplan

• Novice
• Intermediate

Winner of the American Bridge Teachers' Association 2007 Book of the Year award in its original self-published edition, this book has an entirely new approach to teaching the game. It is intended to be a short first course on bridge for people who have never played the game before. No prior experience with any card game is necessary, and the ideas are developed in short, easy steps. Praise for the original edition: "Gary has a refreshing, assume-no-knowledge approach that is sure to entice many new players to this wonderful game." Andrew Robson, British international player and top-rated teacher. "Gary's new book makes learning bridge easy. He puts your mind at rest by telling you how to go about the learning, then he presents the material clearly." Paul Marston, Australia's top gun. "Teachers and students alike will scramble for Gary's book." Randy Bennett, Canadian champion 1990, 1997

• Beginner

In the modern game, the majority of auctions are competitive, and every improving player needs to acquire the tools to handle this kind of bidding. This text covers the basic building blocks of competitive bidding (takeout and negative doubles, preempts, overcalls, competing over their notrump openings and dealing with competition over your own, forcing pass auctions, the Law of Total Tricks, and others). It describes a number of useful conventions and gadgets with which the reader needs to be familiar, and suggests other optional treatments for partnership discussion. Each chapter ends with reviews and quizzes, and the final chapter is a summary quiz covering all the material. This book will fill a major gap in bridge literature – most books on this topic are intended for expert-level players.

• Intermediate

Bidding Slams is Fun Slams are one of the most exciting parts of bridge and, at club level, they occur much more often than they are bid. This book aims to help average and aspiring players to bid a few more of those slams. Unlike many other books on bidding, this book does not provide a system or set of gadgets. Instead, it looks at a number of tournament events and develops a set of thirty key ideas that will work with any system. Almost all the slams in this book are skinny slams, with far fewer than the recommended number of points. But these slams have not been specially selected. Not at all. We include all the slams that occurred in the competitions presented. Instead of points we propose some slam hand templates and introduce ideas such as the thirty-point pack. Bidding and making tight slams is a match-winning strategy. This book will help its readers along the path to more makeable slams and a lot more bidding fun along the way.

Coming Fall 2023 Getting to Good Slams, by the same author (2018), is an in-depth discussion of how to improve your slam bidding. Using examples from tournament play, the author identified hard-to-bid, but good, slams. He focused on the factors that make slam possible, often with far fewer than the traditional number of points, and on how to evaluate your hand during the bidding to become aware that these factors are present. This new book turns the spotlight on an even more useful area -- how to get to good game contracts without just guessing, again often with fewer than the officially-sanctioned number of HCP in the partnership. Anyone who plays IMPs will tell you that this is the area where most matches are won and lost.

• Intermediate
• Advanced

Jude Goodwin's Table Talk cartoons have been appearing for more than 30 years in the American Contract Bridge League's Bulletin. They capture life the way it really is at the bridge table, whether you play in tournaments or with your family in the kitchen. Flip through the pages, and you'll see familiar situations, partners and opponents. And Jude will make you laugh at yourself for taking this game so seriously...

Bridge players constantly argue about the 'best' bidding systems and conventions. Strong Club or Natural? With or without relays? Standard or 2/1? Weak or strong notrump? Was Blue Club really better than the natural systems in the 1950s and 1960s? Is Two-way Stayman as good as Stayman and transfers? Disciplined or undisciplined weak twos -- which work better? And many, many more... Well, now we have the answer to those questions, provided by exhaustive analysis and the results of computer simulations. And not only which is better, but also with how much, typically tested in thousands of 24-board IMP matches. Player skill is eliminated, and bidding methods can be judged solely on their own merits, playing the same deals via the same AI software. It is as objective a test as modern technology can provide. And the results may not be what you would expect...

• Intermediate
• Advanced