Return to my Book Review pages
Go to my home page
Book Review, © Copyright 2002, Jim Loy
I just received my copy of the 6th edition, Editor-in-Chief: Henry Francis. And it is amazing and beautiful as usual. This time I was a contributor, although it fails to say that in the book (Mr. Francis apologized for this oversight, see below). See Fibonacci Numbers, for one of my contributions. The great amount of information in this book is hard to imagine. We have definitions of thousands of terms, descriptions of dozens of bidding systems, many hundreds of bidding conventions (such as South African Texas), much card play (with dozens of pages on squeezes, for example), rules (sometimes in great detail), hundreds of pages of history, and some trivia (kidnapping, murders, scandals, weird hands), and lots about tournament directing. We find all of the national bridge organizations from around the world. There are 166 pages of biography, 62 pages of major tournament results. And the book ends with a bibliography of thousands of bridge books. One of its most famous features is 57 pages of suit combinations (card combinations), like how would you play a suit of Q109xx (Dummy) and Axx (Declarer) and you need four tricks from this suit? If you ever had a question about bridge, the answer is probably in here. Ahhhhh, I love this book.
To order this book, click Amazon.com (goes directly to this book).
By the way, this appeared in the letters to the Editor, in the ACBL Bridge Bulletin, in May 2002:
Jim Loy of Montana was a major contributor to the new edition of The Official Encyclopedia of Bridge. He was not listed among the contributors because of an oversight on my part.
Jim studied the sixth edition thoroughly and sent along hundreds of corrections and updates. He even noticed when a period or a comma was light-face when it should have been bold. He was a primary factor in the upgrading of the book.
My sincere apologies, Jim.
Henry Francis, Memphis TN