My System: The Unbalanced Diamond »

Marshall Miles has been writing bridge books for more than fifty years, and during that time has remained one of the world's leading thinkers on the theory of bidding. His recent gold medal in World Senior Teams shows that he has lost little of his edge with time. This book, a distillation of the ideas he has been developing and evolving over many years, describes what in his view is an optimal bidding system: the one he prefers to play, and the one that has brought him great personal success over the last several years. Serious players will want to study Miles' ideas, and adopt, if not the whole system, many of its concepts into their own bidding.

The System     5
Major-Suit Auctions     19
Two-over-one responses     23
Other major-suit auctions     27
Other auctions     29
The Weak Notrump     35
The Unbalanced Diamond     41
After a major-suit response     41
The notrump responses     46
Responding with minor suits     48
The 1[club suit] Opening     61
Taking it further     65
The 1[Characters not reproducible] relay     67
Refusing the relay     76
The Opening 2[club suit] Bid     83
Responding to the 2[club suit] opening     89
The Two Diamond Opening     97
The Opponents Compete     103
The (negative) double     103
When 1[diamond] is overcalled     107
Competition over our 1NT opening     110
More on (negative) doubles     110
More on overcalls     114
The System in Action     117
A Comparison of Systems     129
A Recapitulation     139
Appendix 1     145
Appendix 2     151