Scarabin, on 2014-February-18, 20:06, said:
The only genuine textbooks I can remember are Love's "Bridge squeezes complete", Mollo & Gardiner's "Card Play Technique" and, perhaps Culbertson's Blue Book.
whereagles, on 2014-February-17, 15:32, said:
Bridge is obviously under-studied. The academic work on it is scarce. Here are some of the milestones I know of
1. "The Mathematical Theory of Bridge", by Emile Borel and Andre Cheron. A bridge statistics book from the 1940s. It's out of print in english, but you can order it in french.
2. Vernes article on The Law of Total Tricks. Foundation of many modern bidding ideas.
3. "I Fought the Law", by Mike Lawrence and Anders Wirgren. Criticism of law of total tricks abuses.
4. "Winning NT/suit contracts leads", by David Bird and Taf Anthias. Major modern work on opening leads. Validates some of the results of Borel & Cheron.
5. "Partnership Bidding at Bridge", by Andrew Robson and Oliver Segal. One of the very few systematic books on bidding. A masterpiece.
6. "Capitancy for Advancing Bridge Players", by Denis Klein. Leadership principles on bidding and defense debated.
There were a number of post talking about (good) textbooks for bridge. I iown and have to agree with the one listed above (OTHER than "the mathematical theory of bridge" which I do not own). You can add some others to this list, show below which I do own. The most obvious missing ones are the first four in the following list (it is unthinkable The Rodwell Files was left off any such list).
1. The Rodwell Files: Secrets of a Bridge Champion, by Eric Rodwell and Mark Horton -- both defense and offense in play. A huge oversight to leave this one out.
2. Expert Bridge Simplified: Arithmetic Shortcuts for Declarer, by Jeff Rubens, A textbook to cover statistical approach to the game.
3. Guide Dog, volume 1 and volume 2, by Marti
4. Master Play - by Terrence Reese
5. The Play of the Hand at Bridge, by Louis Watson (reprinted as Watson;s classice play of the hand at bridge).
6. Bridge Play from A to Z, by George Coffin
7. Many but certainly not all of the "MASTER BRIDGE SERIES" (some actually suck) which includes the wonderful "Adventures in Card Play" (Ottik and Kelsey), and especially also "Blocking and Unblocking and Safety plays at Bridge (Reese and Trezel)
8. Entry Management, by David Bird and Marc Smith,
9. Bridge Probabilities and Information, by Robert MacKinnon (another statistical book. I preferred Rubens book (#2), because of better Bridge issues (and hands), but MacKinnon's textbook is much more clinical and perhaps for a serious student might be a better "textbook".
10. Mike Lawrence's guide books (Guide to.. "overcalls", "passed hand bidding", "doubles", etc), plus his book on Falsecards
I will add an odd one to this list, that would be suitable for some people, "Bridge Squeezes Illustrated" by Fook Eng. It is a mathematical approach to studying bridge, with lemmas (ok, theorems might be the word we would use), postulates, and (gulp) equations. The approach try to explain mathematically how squeezes work, it is clearly not for everyone, but it has to fall into the "textbook" category. I happened to like it (just liked love's squeeze book better).
Of course any bidding system book or book dedicated to one convention or one type of play are also text-book like.
Perhaps Scarabin is referring to Edgar Kaplan's
Card Play at Contract Bridge (1964)
With the deal on the left
South is declarer in 3N on a ♠ lead.