Becoming a good declarer starts with some basic principles. All the books tell you the same thing; before playing to Trick 1, think and form a plan. But what should you think about? Players often look at a deal and see a new mystery, a complex problem. They become overwhelmed. Of all the ways of winning tricks, cashing high cards and taking finesses are easiest. But establishing a long suit requires effort and care. To set up intermediate cards, lose tricks you cannot avoid losing. The most common type of deal is a second suit. This book will focus entirely on variations of second suit type deals. It is divided into chapters, including one on defense, but there is some overlap. I show all four hands for convenience, but try covering the hands except dummy's and your own until you have played the deal through mentally.

We are experiencing a substantial rise in the graduate population just at a time when the suply of suitable jobs is stagnant. There is competition for jobs providing relevent proffessional experience, and graduates are having to be willing to move jobs to capitalise on their experience. This is a detailed and comprehensive book which helps graduates to plan a job search campaign from the preparing for the 'milk round' of prospective employers, to choosing the job which is right for you, composing an effective CV, doing some research about the companies which interest you and honing your interveiw skills.

A 2016 Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book Just when seventeen-year-old Matt thinks he can’t handle one more piece of terrible news, he meets a girl who’s dealt with a lot more—and who just might be able to clue him in on how to rise up when life keeps knocking him down—in this “vivid, satisfying, and ultimately upbeat tale of grief, redemption, and grace” (Kirkus Reviews) from the Coretta Scott King – John Steptoe Award–winning author of When I Was the Greatest. Matt wears a black suit every day. No, not because his mom died—although she did, and it sucks. But he wears the suit for his gig at the local funeral home, which pays way better than the Cluck Bucket, and he needs the income since his dad can’t handle the bills (or anything, really) on his own. So while Dad’s snagging bottles of whiskey, Matt’s snagging fifteen bucks an hour. Not bad. But everything else? Not good. Then Matt meets Lovey. Crazy name, and she’s been through more crazy stuff than he can imagine. Yet Lovey never cries. She’s tough. Really tough. Tough in the way Matt wishes he could be. Which is maybe why he’s drawn to her, and definitely why he can’t seem to shake her. Because there’s nothing more hopeful than finding a person who understands your loneliness—and who can maybe even help take it away.

This book updates the thesis I produced for my PhD at the Department of Artificial Intelligence of the University of Edinburgh, correcting errors, and improving some of the formatting and readability. Since the original work was completed (early 1996), research has progressed. Most notably, the public profile of AI and game-playing has reached new heights with the feats of the chess computer DEEPER BLUE (which surely uses AI, no matter what IBM would have us believe). Although less heralded, the ability of computers to play Bridge (the main example domain in this book) has also increased. In July of 1997 a world championship for computer Bridge programs was hosted by the American Contract Bridge League in Albuquerque, New Mex ico. This contest was won by a program called Bridge Baron, produced by Great Game Products. Bridge Baron incorporates knowledge-based planning techniques developed by Stephen Smith and Dana Nau [1, 2]. Progress has also been made on the contrasting, more brute-force, approach of sampling the possible card distributions. In particular, Matt Ginsberg has developed a fast double-dummy solver based on partition search [3]. Ginsberg's program fared poorly in the 1997 Bridge championships, but Ginsberg himself reports very promising results [4] on a hard set of complete Bridge deals taken from the Bridge tutoring program Bridge Master.