Product Description

This collection of oddities shows how Contract Bridge has played its part in embezzlement, murder, suicide, kidnapping, imprisonment and battle. The stories feature similar hands to those of bridge - the complete misfit, the two-way slam and men against women - while others, like 'Thirteen Spades' and 'The Raspberry Jam Conundrum', are closer to fantasy. Adaptations of the game, such as Nullo Bridge and Egdirb, are also included. Every hand in this book is a winner. Unless, of course, you were the player who was dealt thirteen hearts but bid diamonds by mistake.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #380988 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 266 pages

About the Author
Andrew Ward is a freelance writer whose numerous books include Kicking & Screaming and I'm On Me Mobile. He created Robson's 'Strangest' series with books on football, cricket, horseracing and golf, and he has now turned his attention to Contract Bridge. He has been playing bridge for 35 years.

Customer Reviews

Fails to provide much bridge insight
This book is actually called "Bridge's Strangest Hands", not "Bridge's Strangest Games".

Andrew Ward is not a specialist bridge author. His other books include "Football's strangest matches" and the like. Although clearly reasonably competent at bridge, he is not an expert. He fails to answer the obvious questions, or povide the bridge insight, an interested player would hope for in looking at these hands.

Early in the book he says he isn't going to provide a parade of extreme hands. (13 card suits somehow turn up far more often than fair odds would suggest, suggesting a mix of pack-fixing, dubious shuffling, and pure invention is behind many of the cases recorded.) But proceeds to provide quite a lot of them, and fairly boring many of them are once you've seen one or two cases.

I suspect that a lot of these cases are culled from earlier bridge books he has researched, rather than being things he has spotted in the annals of world championships and the like, or come across in his playing career, as any active bridge expert would be able to provide.

A disappointing buy.