Ray and I were very pleased when we were offered the opportunity to republish Clyde E. Love’s Bridge Squeezes Complete. After all, it is still on many people’s lists as one of the best and most important bridge books ever written. We both recalled the book fondly from early in our bridge careers. I read and reread it; I remember getting out a deck of cards, laying out deals for the Exercises and Problems on my bed and carefully working through them. Professor Love was absolutely correct: reading this book will make you a better bridge player. You cannot possibly work out at the bridge table what you need to know about how squeezes operate, no matter how often you play. That is something you need to learn.

However, at the same time we both remembered that we never actually finished reading the whole book and that we didn’t always fully understand what Love was trying to tell us. In a way he reminded me of my university mathematics professors who would either leave things as exercises for the student or give very terse mathematical explanations……

Love’s book still forms the basis for all discussions of squeezes, and the squeeze vocabulary he invented has become part of the language. Only a few days ago, I saw several online bridge commentators joking about BLUE – and every one of them knew exactly what it meant. Squeeze theory has also advanced, however – subsequent writers have built on the foundation that Love’s work provided.

All of these developments in the game and its language, as well as advances in theory, represented challenges for us. They meant that we would have to make substantial changes to the book while still attempting to retain the wit, insights and approach to squeeze theory of the original. And even though we recognized that the word ‘complete’ in the title would never really be true, we needed to include at least some of the important new ideas in squeeze theory of the last half-century.

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The next decision was how much new material to include, and what it should be….  In some cases, new material could be included in the appropriate chapter, but in others it just didn’t fit. Finally I decided to add a new chapter, which would provide a brief survey of some fascinating (if generally fairly rare) squeezes that are too far beyond the scope of the original book.

One of the big decisions was whether or not to change any of the nomenclature. I ‘loved’ BLUE, but there were other acronyms and terms that didn’t seem to work as well. More than one generation of bridge players has learned to use these names, though, and many of them are pervasive in squeeze literature. So I knew we had to tread lightly. Every idea for a change was carefully weighed. For example, I couldn’t understand why Love had used ‘A’ for ‘access’ instead of ‘E’ for ‘entry’ when talking about a type of strip-squeeze, leading to the awkward acronym CLA. However, in one place in the book he did refer to it as CLE; that, I felt, justified making a change and using the more felicitous mnenonic CLuE. The most significant other issue was in the realm of the double squeeze. In this edition we refer to the threat jointly guarded by both opponents as ‘C’ for ‘Common’ and not ‘B’ for ‘Both’, since references to ‘Common suit’ and ‘Common threat’ flow much more smoothly………………………..