June 5th, 2013 ~ Steve Bloom ~
1 Comment 
Lots of interesting hands last night, and lots to discuss. Let me start you off with two new suit combination problems. You are playing in four hearts, and will make the contract if you can hold your trump losers to one. Here is your trump suit:
(1)
You lead the two from the table, and East plays a low card. What do you play from hand? Read the rest of this entry »
May 28th, 2013 ~ Steve Bloom ~
1 Comment
Last night, our group played mostly at two different tables, with very little overlap in the hands played. That’s too bad, since it is fun to see how a hand was handled more than once. In general, the play at one table was excellent, but, unfortunately, the play at the other table was poor. Oh well, that happens. Read the rest of this entry »
May 21st, 2013 ~ Steve Bloom ~
4 Comments
Two hands to discuss this week, a declarer play problem and a defensive problem. Let’s start with the declarer play hand, board 11, one which is very, very tricky. Read the rest of this entry »
May 14th, 2013 ~ Steve Bloom ~
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Last week, I talked suit combinations, including restricted choice inferences. Incredibly enough, the same theme showed up last night. It was like the card gods dealt out lesson hands. Read the rest of this entry »
May 7th, 2013 ~ Steve Bloom ~
1 Comment
I didn’t find a lot to discuss in the play of the hands from Sunday. Only one hand really caught my attention, board 11, where the contract depended on finding the best way to tackle a side suit.
We will get back to that hand in a bit. But that concept, the best way to tackle various holdings, seems like a good topic for this week. We call these suit combinations, and learning the best way to tackle various suits is integral to developing your declarer play skills. Many books discuss suit combinations, and there is an excellent software program out that finds the best way to deal with any suit combination. The program is called Suit Play, available as freeware at http://home.planet.nl/~narcis45/SuitPlay/
Read the rest of this entry »
April 29th, 2013 ~ Steve Bloom ~
5 Comments
We start off with the defensive problem that I left for you to ponder:
The play had started with two rounds of diamonds, the second trumped by declarer. Next came the spade ace and king, dropping partner’s queen, and the heart seven, six from partner, upside down count, queen from the table. Read the rest of this entry »
April 27th, 2013 ~ Steve Bloom ~
1 Comment
My theme this week is counting. There is a pretty good chance that counting will be my theme next week, and the week after, and the week after that, and …
Counting is incredibly easy and incredibly hard. There are only 13 cards in a suit. If you have four hearts, dummy has three hearts, and someone shows out on the second round of the suit, then the fourth player started with five hearts. Any third grader could do this arithmetic. Read the rest of this entry »
April 25th, 2013 ~ Steve Bloom ~
4 Comments
ABOUT THIS BLOG: This contains posts written to a group of students in the USBF Junior Program, about hands that they played online. Although this is intended for their use, anyone is welcome to browse through my comments.
Hi. First off, let me introduce myself. I am Steven Bloom. In my real life, I taught mathematics, until I retired. I started playing bridge in the 1970s. In 1973, forty years ago(!), I formed a partnership with a beautiful and talented woman, Betty Crowther, who is now my wife. I have played almost exclusively with her ever since. For a while we were pretty good. Now, however, we are just old. Oh well. Read the rest of this entry »
April 23rd, 2013 ~ Steve Bloom ~
1 Comment
There is a new blogger in our mix!
Please extend a warm welcome to Steve Bloom who has
recently become a bridgeblogging blogger.
Visit Steve’s Blog to view posts.
… the BridgeBlogging Bloggers Team 🙂
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