Hugh Kelsey is one of the all-time great bridge authors, and Killing Defence at Bridge is an absolute classic. It’s a “problem” type book, where you’re given your hand and dummy, the auction, and the early play, and are asked to plan your defense.
Here’s a typical example:
♠ JT7
♥ T64
♦ AKQT3
♣ 94
S N ♠ 653
1♠ 2♦ ♥ K85
2♠ 3♠ ♦ J6
4♠ — ♣ J8752 “West leads the three of clubs against South’s four spade contract. How do you plan the defence?”
There is a skill to getting the most out of this kind of book. My tendency is to be lazy and impatient and keep straight on reading to the solution. Much better is to take your time and come up with your solution to the problem before reading on. This is an essential element of Deliberate Practice—you want to make your decision and get immediate feedback.
So, take your time and plan your defense. (I’m going to spell it the American way when I’m not quoting Kelsey!)
Kelsey’s analysis is that “the only hope is that partner has a trump trick and that you can make three tricks in hearts.” Since you want partner to shift to hearts from their AQ or AJ when they get in with their trump trick, you need them to know there is no future in clubs. If you play the ♣J at trick 1, they will not be sure whether you have the ♣Q and may go wrong; you should play a low club at trick 1 and give them no option but to play you for the ♥K.
Partner’s hand: ♠ K2 ♥ AJ73 ♦ 984 ♣ KT63
Kelsey emphasizes—and re-emphasizes!—counting. Five of the 12 chapters are dedicated to counting, and even in the others counting is a common theme. It’s a great approach, and an absolutely necessary one. I found it good practice and good training.
There are several problems with books of this type, most of which are pretty unavoidable. As I mentioned in my newsletter last week, the timing of presenting the problem identifies the key moment. At the table, no one gives you the hint when it’s time for the important play. It’s much easier to find the third-hand-low play above, for example, when it’s presented as a problem. Often the analysis will begin with something like, “You lead the three of spades, declarer finesses in trumps and you win your king. What do you do now?” But the problem could easily have been the opening lead, or whether to duck the king of trumps. Without stopping at each decision point, it’s impossible not to telegraph the essential decision moment. I think Barry Rigal’s Test your Bridge Judgement (which I helped edit, along with Christopher Rivera, for Bridge Winners Press), does a slightly better job of this, stopping multiple times during the hand—during the bidding and the play—to force the reader to make a choice and then assigning a grade. It’s not perfect, but it’s just not feasible to stop at every mundane card you have to play.
Another issue is grouping problems around a common theme. There are chapters dedicated to squeeze defense, end-game defense, and falsecards (both your falsecards to fool declarer and seeing through declarer’s attempts at obfuscation). These are essential areas to cover, but finding the right play is much easier when you know there’s a squeeze to break up. (Not surprisingly, given the heft of his tome on squeezes [which is not for the faint of heart], Kelsey devotes more time than warranted to squeeze defense.) It’s useful to examine themes together, so I don’t know that there is a solution to this. The counting chapters include examples from all of these types of problems, so they serve as a general test, which I think is the best you can do.
The original version of Killing Defence at Bridge was published in 1966.
I have a copy of this one, but I read the new edition published in 1992. While the fundamentals of defense haven’t changed, a lot has evolved in both bidding and signaling sophistication since the 60s. English methods at that time included weak notrumps and 4-card major-suit openings. I often felt adrift trying to glean information from the auction, which is of course an essential part of defense. Kelsey would say things like, “From the bidding, declarer must have…” and I would be like, “OK, if you say so.” There were also times when a modern pair would have extra—often very useful—information from partner’s carding, such as a suit preference signal in the trump suit.
Trying to update the bidding would be nearly impossible, so it’s just one of those quirks you have to live with in a classic book like this. It’s certainly not enough to keep me from recommending it, but it’s important to know going in that the auctions are not always going to mean what you think they mean.
These shortcomings aside, it’s still a classic for a reason. Even when you analyze the hand correctly, Kelsey’s solutions are often imaginative or highly technical. He loves surrounding plays and flamboyant plays of honors to block suits or kill entries. Even when I picked up the inferences and was basically defending double dummy, I didn’t always find his elegant solutions. I would figure out that it was right to switch to clubs, but I had to switch to the nine for some obscure reason.
I’m very glad I re-read this one.