In any Swiss Teams or IMP Pairs tournament, you will soon enough find yourself facing opponents who are frequent or consistent winners. How is it that when you earn your chance to challenge them, more of the IMP swings seem to go their way than yours?

That's the focus of this book, which reviews over 100 deals that generated swings in IMPs competitions. It examines how effective bidding methods and logical play or defense led to the outcome at the table. The deals illustrate many useful take-home messages. Here are a few:

• when playing for IMPs, the glass is never half empty, always half full
• be creative about pre-empting, especially in first and third seat
• always be "slam aware"
• when the contract looks good, consider what could go wrong and play safely
• in defense, think about how to maintain communication with partner

The book is in quiz format, with each set of deals followed by a thought-provoking commentary.