Bid

"WIN AT WHIST" by Joe Andrews is the most complete book on the game of Whist since Edmund Hoyle first wrote about the game in the 1700's. This book covers all of the bases with a nice history of the game, and then continues with a full reference to the many variations which have evolved. There is generous mention of the popular "Kitty with Jokers" Bid Whist Tournament game which has been promoted by Dennis Barmore and his "sharksinc" live event tour. Mr. Andrews has listed a full glossary of terms and definitions, and finishes his book with a sampling of several illustrative hands. Each hand has a teaching/instructional theme. Although there are a few other published Whist pamphlets/books out there which are quite good, "WIN AT WHIST" is at the head of the class. If you want to excel in high-level competitive play, by all means check out this book!

My name is Dennis J Barmore. I am the Founder of The National Card Sharks, Inc. Bid Whist Organization. We represent thousands of Bid Whist players throughout the USA. ...

I have just finished reading this book, and it is a must for beginning and advanced players of whist. The narrative is written in clear concise words that are easy to understand.

The sample hands in the book are excellently crafted and are legitimate teaching aids that can enhance the skills of players on all levels.

There have been many times when people have asked our Bid Whist players, "How Do You Play Whist? Needless to say that is an impossible question to verbally answer. Thank goodness there is a book out there that we can now point to.

If you are at all interested in learning the game, or purchasing a gift for that whist playing friend or relative, this book will serve as a unique gift idea.

My bridge Partner and I decided that we wanted a new challenge of learning a different card game. We learned that there was a Bid Whist tournament being played in Atlanta and we had only one day to learn. We sat down and began reading the book together. It was so well written...so clear to understand...that within 24 hours we played in that tournament. We paid a $40 entry fee and felt confident enough about what we had learned. We did not win the tournament but we had an above average score and had a marvelous time.

The next time I played was in a foursome in my home -- I played with a stranger and we won!!!

An Excellent book for anyone wanting to get started playing Bid Whist or for someone wishing to sharpen their skills.

I have already personally delivered copies of this book to players and would recommend it to any card playing addict.

This is a new, updated edition of one of the greatest bridge books of all time. Teaches you how to think like a bridge player. Much of the material is aimed toward advanced beginners and intermediates, but even new players will benefit from her clear approach and practical advice.

This book(copyright 1966,pub.1976) is an easy book to follow and understand. It has an enjoyable flow in its teaching and understanding of the game of bridge. I found it brought me back to the basics of the game. It cut through all the clutter that seems to attach itself to the game of bridge. I had initially thought:"What can an old book teach me!". Well I learned a lot! It is a bridge book for everyone.

awesome book. best book ever. good sailing lingo. would recomend this book to any sailor/boater. easy to read im 14 and read this book very fast moving. can't put it down.

This is a wonderful story of Maryland's Eastern Shore humor. The setting starts in the town of Oxford, MD where a few of the locals put their heads together and come up with their own specially-designed boat with local flare to enter the world-famous America's Cup Race in Perth. The result is a hilarious. All sailing advocates should read this wonderful story! And, for anyone from the eastern shore, some of the characters just might sound a little familiar...

The sort of book you can't put down once you get started, particularly if business, marketing and sport interest you, Written as an autobiography, in an honest if sometimes basic style, nevertheless a very fascinating & gripping tale of the Olympic selection saga, from getting agreement with Melbourne over one Aussie bid, to competing with other major cities - from Manchester to Beijing.

Strong NT or weak NT this approach is excellent with many examples. Klinger is an excellent writer and analyst.

Bid to Win on Ebay provides a systematic approach to buying items on this auction venue. It's so easy to assume that one knows all there is to know about bidding, but reading this book reveals that there are three major approaches to bidding and choosing the one appropriate for your needs is one thing this book will help you do.
This book also brings to light many pitfalls of certain common bidding strategies that seem like "common sense" but lead to commiting one's self to a much higher auction price than one might have anticipated at the start of an auction.
Another thing this book teaches is how to have the proper mindset. Losing an auction can be anywhere from acceptable to devastating, emotionally, depending on mindset. Understand Law 9 from this book will help you avoid the mindset that will lead to unpleasant feelings should you not be the high bidder in an auction.
Included are useful tables of closely-guarded Ebay bid increments and other information that only someone deeply familiar with the inner workings of Ebay could know. At the very least, this book puts a whole host of figures and facts at your fingertips for easy reference before, during and after an auction.
One especially fascinating portion of this book is how to decipher bidding histories. To the layman, it's just a list of who's bidding, but Mr. Cook analyzes it and breaks it down in such a way that several types of bidders can be spotted and identified, giving you an advantage of knowing what strategies others are using.
Finally, there are many lessons in "buyer beware"--pitfalls in auction terminology that can mislead buyers into thinking they are receiving something other than the actual item the seller intends to ship.
Ironically, this book will probably become the "bible" for Ebay sellers, because it comprehensively discusses a wide range of possible bidding strategies--knowing how the bidding works, the seller can benefit too! So this book is multifunctional, as it serves the buyer/bidder AND the seller. Knowledge is power. This book is chock full of both!

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time! The perspectives on independence in thought and action brought out by the author and the cynical, yet life-like depiction of commonly held beliefs is amazing!!!

A Must-read for people who liked the Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged or Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance!

Writing Killer Sales Proposals is written as a "hands-on" book that you can immediately use to help you write winning proposals. The examples are real examples taken from past work with clients, proposals I've written, and RFPs that I've responded to or written for clients.

In Writing Killer Sales Proposals we review important concepts such as the difference between features and benefits and the value of solution selling instead of product selling. We emphasize getting a clear selling theme established early and revisiting that theme as often as possible. And finally, we help you to understand how to organize and structure a proposal process that allows you to work more quickly and efficiently on the proposal mechanics - giving you more time to spend on the business issues, the solution, and pricing.

With this new book, I have incorporated my experience as an RFP writer and manager. I have provided many "tips" directly from my experience in reviewing proposals and speaking with others who write RFPs. This experience, as both a proposal writer and an RFP manager, provides me with a unique perspective and viewpoint that few proposal writers can offer in this industry. I hope that this experience shines through in these pages and that it will help you to write better proposals.

Bud Porter-Roth
Author

Good partnerships will have sophisticated mechanisms for finding the right contract when given free rein of the bidding, but in reality the majority of bridge hands lead to competitive auctions. With each side interfering with the other, the situation suddenly becomes much less clear. After reading this book, you will no longer have to rely completely on mere guesswork and intuition to decide whether to bid or not to bid.

Larry Cohen introduces and expounds upon the Law of Total Tricks, a single principle which will allow you to estimate the possible scores resulting from almost any competitive auction. He describes some of the corollaries of the Law, as well as some good conventions that make use of the Law. These will improve the game of anybody not already familiar with such maxims as "bid to the number of trump your side has" and "when in doubt bid four spades over four hearts."

Even so, this book feels somehow incomplete. It does a good job of conveying the basic idea of the Law, giving examples of its application in relatively straightforward situations. But only in the last two chapters does Cohen begin to describe the adjustments that must be made in situations where the Law is not completely accurate. Furthermore, he doesn't really cover what to do in situations where the Law predicts ambiguous results: when bidding on might produce a better or worse result than passing, depending on the play of the hand. In these cases Cohen leaves us once again to guesswork and intuition.

Despite these faults, this book is essential because it does at least reduce the amount of guesswork to which the bridge player must resort in contested auctions.

If your bridge library were extremely small, one MUST item would be The Law of Total Tricks. It's a gem, one that will change the way you think at bridge and one that will help you make those tough part-score and higher competitive decisions which are ordinarily such "guess work". This book will help you evaluate your bidding options with much greater assurance and accuracy.

This is an essential book for any serious player. The only concern is that the intermediate player may come to believe that this is a substitute for judgement. Still this should improve the competitive bidding decisions for any player who is somehow not familiar with "The Law".

Those interested in a somewhat different valuation style should look into losing trick count originally popularized in Britain which has been around for some time.

The recent death of Spectacular Bid (06/09/2003) marks the end of a wondrous decade of Thoroughbred racing that featured the likes of Secretariat, Ruffian, Forego, Affirmed, Seattle Slew, and of course, the Bid himself. He outlasted all of his great compatriots from the 1970s and was, according to his trainer Buddy Delp, "the greatest horse ever to look through a bridle." You don't have to agree with Mr. Delp to enjoy this book since Bid was also ranked the tenth greatest American Thoroughbred of the Twentieth Century by "The Blood Horse" magazine. Out of his compatriots, only Secretariat (second), Forego (eighth), and Seattle Slew (ninth) were placed ahead of this great, gray race horse. And we could argue all day about whether Affirmed (twelfth) should have been placed ahead of him, too.

Author Timothy T. Capps has served as an executive with Matchmaker, a company that sold stallion seasons and shares, and his book reveals a bias (more so than others in this Thoroughbred Legends series) toward the breeding side of the Thoroughbred business. This emphasis is a bit peculiar in Spectacular Bid's case since this champion on the track was not considered a great success in the breeding shed. He started out strongly, siring twenty-eight stakes winners from his first four crops when his book included some of the nation's finest broodmares. Then his yearling prices and stud fee began their long decline. Bid offspring took a relatively long time to develop and that was the kiss of death as far as the commercial breeders were concerned. They were (and are) looking for brilliant two-year-olds and Classics contenders.

Spectacular Bid also covered sport mares his last several years. He closed out his career standing for $3,500 in New York and covered ten mares this year.

His glory days were on the track, and his racing career is my favorite part of this book. He won 26 out of 30 races and was a champion all three years that he raced. He was held in such high esteem by the betting public that he went off at 1-20 eight times during his career and 1-10 five times.

Bid was the greatest of the 'almost' Triple Crown winners, and Capps handles Delp's story about the safety pin on Belmont Day with great tact. A retired trainer once told me that nobody on the backside believed there really was a safety pin. They reckoned that if Bid had been properly trained up to the Belmont (a too-fast work on the Monday before the Belmont saw "a fatigued horse going back to the barn") and if he had gotten a decent ride during the race itself--well, we would have seen three Triple Crown winners in a row, instead of two.

This book pays fitting tribute to the great son of Bold Bidder and Spectacular, most especially in the author's chapter on Bid's brilliant undefeated, weight-carrying, recording-setting four-year-old season.

NOTE: The oldest living winner of a Triple Crown race is now Coastal (27), the colt who defeated Spectacular Bid in the Belmont.

I was a young man when I went to the 1979 Belmont Stakes, and I was HUGE fan of Spectacular Bid.

Everyone had tried to make a rivalry between Flying Paster, who had won some key races on the West Coast and The Bid, but I was unwavering in my support for him.

After he took both the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, many newspaper writers were commenting that the Triple Crown was not that difficult anymore as we had seen Seattle Slew and Affirmed win in back to back years and now the Bid was going to make it three in a row.

I bought my "Extra" $2 ticket to have as a souvenir of the Bid's Triple Crown win, and I was all excited and anxious to see him race at Belmont.

The day was festive and exciting, and then the big race was upon us.

The bid had beaten most of these horses before, and distance was no problem with his breeding.

Well, to all those people who wrote it was getting easy to win a triple crown, it is now 2003 and we have not seen one since 1978.

Coming around the far turn and into the stretch, The Bid clipped heels and almost fell. One of his rivals from the earlier races, Bet Twice, was able to get a big lead coming into the stretch when this happened. The Bid valliantly re railed, but it was not possible to recover from the near fall.

Many people would tell you it was a miracle Bid finished at all and was not injured.

But this book to see what else happened to him, but be prepared to smile and revel in the glory of Spectacular Bid. He was one who was successful on the track and in the breeding shed.

Nice Job Tim Capps ! Buy this book for your collection !

Best Regards to all, MC - TheStickRules.Com

I already knew a lot of the Spectacular Bid story because he (Bid) is the sire of one of our horses, and we had done significant research into "Dad's" background, history, etc. I wound up getting this book as a premium for renewing our Blood Horse magazine subscription, and wasn't disappointed. The author does a very good job telling all sides of Spectacular Bid's story, including the loss at Belmont. But beyond that - and that's where most people's knowledge of Spectacular Bid ends - the author does a good job covering the many races that followed that solidified the horse's legacy as one of the all-time greats.

I would imagine that with the popularity of the book about Seabiscuit and the upcoming movie, interest in great horses from the past may be on the upswing. I recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn about one of the true racing greats. Spectacular Bid is often overshadowed by Seattle Slew and Affirmed because of not winning the Triple Crown, but the writer does a good job of letting the reader know how good he really was.