Marc Smith (born 1960) is a British bridge player, columnist [1] and writer. [2] Marc Smith represented Great Britain as a junior, winning the 1985 European Union Junior Teams Championship. [3] He has a host of wins in national events, and reached the final of the World Mixed Pairs Championship playing with his wife, Charlotte. [4] [5] His book, co-authored with Barbara Seagram, 25 Bridge Conventions You Should Know, won the American Bridge Teachers' Association 1999 Shirley Silverman Award for Best Student Book. [6]
A squeeze play is a technique used in contract bridge and other trick-taking games in which the play of a card forces an opponent to discard a winner or the guard of a potential winner. The situation typically occurs in the end game, with only a few cards remaining. Although numerous types of squeezes have been analyzed and catalogued in contract bridge, they were first discovered and described in whist.
A (bridge) signal is a move in the card game of contract bridge in which partners defending against a contract play particular cards in a manner which gives a coded meaning or signal to guide their subsequent card play. This may also be referred to as carding. Signals are usually given with the cards from the two-spot to the nine-spot. There are three types of signals:
A bridge convention is an agreement about an artificial call or a set of related artificial calls. Calls made during the auction phase of a contract bridge game convey information about the player's card holdings. Calls may be "natural" or "artificial".
In the card game "contract bridge", a splinter bid is a convention whereby a double jump response in a side-suit indicates excellent support, a singleton or void in that side-suit, and at least game-going strength. Some partnerships agree that the maximum strength can be only that necessary to reach a game contract; stronger holdings with major suit support instead might temporize with a Jacoby 2NT bid.
Alan Fraser Truscott was a British-American bridge player, writer, and editor. He wrote the daily bridge column for The New York Times for 41 years, from 1964 to 2005, and served as Executive Editor for the first six editions of The Official Encyclopedia of Bridge from 1964 to 2002.
Robert David "Bob" Hamman is an American professional bridge player, among the greatest players of all time. He is from Dallas, Texas.
Roger Trézel was a French bridge player and writer. He and his long-time regular partner Pierre Jaïs were the first two of ten players who have won the Triple Crown of Bridge. Their achievement was unique for more than twenty years and they accomplished it on the earliest occasion possible. Having played on the France team that won the 1956 Bermuda Bowl representing Europe against the United States, they won the inaugural renditions of both premier World Bridge Federation quadrennial events, the 1960 World Team Olympiad and the 1962 World Open Pairs Championship. Trézel and Jaïs also won the Sunday Times Invitational pairs tournament in 1963.
In the card game contract bridge, DONT is a conventional overcall used to interfere with an opponent's one notrump (1NT) opening bid. DONT, an acronym for Disturb Opponents' Notrump, was designed by Marty Bergen, and is therefore also referred to as "Bergen over Notrump". Although the method is often criticized for being too nebulous, it remains fairly popular. The convention was first published in the September/October 1989 issue of Bridge Today.
Cappelletti is a bridge bidding convention for the card game contract bridge, primarily used to interfere over opponent's one notrump (1NT) opening. Usually attributed to Michael Cappelletti and his longtime partner Edwin Lewis, origin of the concept is also claimed by Fred Hamilton, John Pottage and Gerald Helms.
In contract bridge, various bidding systems have been devised to enable partners to describe their hands to each other so that they may reach the optimum contract. Key to this process is that players evaluate and re-evaluate the trick-taking potential of their hands as the auction proceeds and additional information about partner's hand and the opponent's hands becomes available.
Bridge Base Incorporated was a company founded in 1990 by Fred Gitelman, president, and Sheri Winestock, vice-president, and based in Las Vegas, Nevada. Although its first two products, BASE II (1990) and BASE III (1991), were analytical tools designed for serious students of bridge, it was most famous for offering free online contract bridge through its website Bridge Base Online (BBO), with which it became synonymous. As of October 2007, it was owned by Gitelman, along with Uday Ivatury, Bill Gates, Sharon Osberg, and David Smith. Bridge Base, Inc. was dissolved on February 15, 2019, after its main product, Bridge Base Online, was sold to another company.
The opening lead is the first card played in the playing phase of a contract bridge deal. The defender sitting to the left (LHO) of the declarer is the one who makes the opening lead. Since it is the only card played while dummy's cards are still concealed, it can be critical for the outcome of the deal. Making the best opening lead is a combination of selecting the best suit and then the best card within that suit.
Barbara Seagram is a Canadian Registered Nurse and contract bridge writer, teacher, and administrator. She is co-author of thirty-two published bridge books, including co-writing with Marc Smith 25 Bridge Conventions You Should Know, which received the American Bridge Teachers' Association (ABTA) Book of the Year award in 1999. The book is in its 19th printing and has been translated into French, German, Japanese, Portuguese and Danish.
Tim Bourke is an Australian bridge player and writer. He is internationally renowned as a collector and composer of bridge hands, or deals, having composed most of those in David Bird's "Abbot" series since 1996.
Bridge Squeezes Complete is a book on contract bridge written by Ann Arbor, Michigan-based mathematics professor Clyde E. Love, originally published in 1959. Written in a "dry, mathematical way", it is still considered one of the most important bridge books ever written and the squeeze vocabulary Love invented remains the basis for all discussions of squeezes.
Clyde Elton Love was an American contract bridge author and mathematics professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was a native of Bancroft, Michigan and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1905.
Planning the Play of a Bridge Hand is a book on contract bridge co-written by the Canadian teacher and author Barbara Seagram and the British author David Bird. It was published by Master Point Press in 2009.
Texas transfer, or simply Texas, is a bidding convention in contract bridge designed to get the partnership to game in a major suit opposite a one notrump or two notrump opening, thus making the opener declarer and keeping the stronger hand hidden from the opponents. Texas is used in response to a notrump opening when holding a six-card or longer major suit and at least game-going features; responder may have interest in slam via continuations in Blackwood or its variants. Originated independently by David Carter of St. Louis and Olle Willner of Sweden,