Links to sites that provide clear, useful, free information on techniques for playing and winning various brain games:
Chess Corner: Tutorial
If you're just starting out, have a look at this site: it gives clear
descriptions and avoids complicated terminology.
Board setup, piece moves, rules, checkmate, stalemate. Algebraic notation.
Checkmate patterns (queen & rook, 2 rooks,...). Openings. Capture strategy.
Tactics (fork, pin, skewer, discovered attack, removing the defender,
overloading, deflection, decoying). Typical openings (33 examples).
Chess Guru: Learning to Play Chess
Use the links at the top (not the ads by Google): Chess rules, Get better,
Middle game, Endgame, Opening, Tactic.
For each major section, in order to get all the information,
you have to keep clicking on the easy-to-miss "next" button
at the bottom of each page.
Chess rules, moves, piece hierarchy, board numbering, space & time,
opening traps. Opening guidelines. Middle game remarks. Endgame remarks,
square rule, opposition, Zugzwang, one-queen checkmate, one-rook checkmate,
two-rook checkmate, two-bishops checkmate. Midgame back rank trap.
Tactics: double attack, fork, double check, pinning, discovered attack,
x-ray attack, interception, removing the defender, blocking the king,
freeing, overloading, intermediate move, deflection, decoying,
king's pawn, forcing a stalemate.
Chess Teacher Lessons
Starting position, chess pieces, rules, algebraic chess notation,
value of pieces. Capture, defense, twofold attack, stalemate.
Basic checkmates. Piece mobility. Forks, eliminating the defender,
pin, discovered attack, skewer. Attacking a pinned piece, square rule.
Endgame (knight pawn, rook pawn, opposition,...). Forcing a draw.
This list is not at all complete: there are 100 lessons(!),
most of them with a user-controlled step-by-step animation.
Jon Edwards: Chess is Fun
Moves for each piece, relative values of pieces. Basic strategy for rook,
knight, bishop, pawn. Capitalizing on a weakness. Opening strategy, with
animated lessons on opening. 18 different tactics. Endgame animated examples:
the basic mates (mate with 2 rooks, with queen & rook, ...);
the basic endgames (bishop vs. pawn, rook vs. pawn,...).
My Chess Blog: 50 Strategies to Gain the Upper Hand Over your Opponent.
50 very concise pieces of advice.
Wikipedia: Chess Tactics
Gaining material (discovered attack, fork, pin, skewer}. Pawns. Sacrifices.
Zugzwang. Zwischenzug.
This site is laid out in typical Wiki fashion, where you can click on terms,
or not, depending on whether you need a clarification.
(At the end there are four links to other Wiki pages on chess, for example
Chess Strategy, but those additional pages don't
contain a great deal of helpful information.)
BrainBashers Sudoku Help
Scanning: intersections, forced move.
Pencil marks: pinned square, locked sets, hidden sets,
intersection removal, X-wing, swordfish, unique rectangles, BUG+1,
XY-wing, XYZ-wing.
Clear, concise explanations.
This site also provides daily printable sudokus at 6 levels
of difficulty.
SST: Sudoku Strategies and Tactics
Scanning: nearly full house, shadowing, only-digit.
Pencil marks: naked & hidden locked sets, claims, fish,
unique rectangles, BUG+n, twin tagging, smart fork,
wrong chain, gotcha chain.
Many examples.
SudoCue: Sudoku Solving Guide
Pencil marks: naked & hidden locked subsets, locked candidates,
X-wing, swordfish, jellyfish, finned fish, coloring, empty rectangle,
remote pairs, XY-wing, XYZ-wing, aligned pair exclusions,
almost locked sets, BUG+1, unique rectangles.
All on one long page.
Sudopedia: Solving Technique
Pencil marks: singles, intersection removal, naked & hidden locked subsets,
fish, single-digit patterns, coloring, uniqueness methods, chains, loops,
wings, almost locked sets, subset exclusions.
This is a wiki, with contributions from many different people.
Wikipedia: List of Poker Hands
Ranking of poker hands (straight flush,
four of a kind, full house,...).
Wikipedia: Glossary of Poker Terms
Several hundred common poker terms.
Michael Wiesenberg: The Official Dictionary of Poker
Huge, complete dictionary of poker terms.
Steve Badger: How to Play Poker
Hand rankings.
Types of games (Texas hold'em, Omaha hold'em, 7-card stud,
7-card stud high-low, 5-card draw, 5-card draw lowball, 7-card stud lowball);
rules for all the preceding.
Glossary of about 150 poker terms.
Texas hold'em strategy; Omaha strategy.
Poker skills, poker psychology, body language
(yours & your opponent's).
HowStuffWorks: How to Play Poker
(You'll do a lot of clicking because the material is broken up
into very small chunks, but there's a lot of information here.)
Poker basics (including ranking of hands).
How to play: Texas hold'em, Omaha, 7-card stud, 5-card draw.
Betting tips; calculating odds; bluffing.
Short glossary of poker terms.
Wikipedia: Poker Strategy
This site concentrates on verbal descriptions of the psychological
side of poker (as opposed to talking about specific hands).
Pot odds & poker probabilities; deception;
position (of play around the table);
reasons to raise; reasons to call; gap concept & sandwich effect;
loose/tight play; aggressive/passive play; hand reading and tells;
opponent profiling.
The Betting link explains all the mechanics of how the game proceeds.
At the end there are links to more extensive articles on
poker plays (aggression, bluffing, check-raise,...).
Learn How to Play Poker: Strategy Articles
Links to a dozen articles on the applied psychology of poker.
(The articles at LearnHowToPlayPoker.org are better than the
external articles.)
The jargon is thick in these articles,
so you'll have to know poker lingo.
BarelyBad: Crossword Rules
Skip to the 2nd half of the page: Rules for Clues and Answers.
There are eight rules. For example, the first one is
"If the clue is a person's last name, then the answer will be
a person's last name" (and examples are given).
BarelyBad: Crossword -- How to Play Well
This is a long page; the best sections are these:
D. Which Clue Next?
H. Guessing Ending Letters.
M. Cute Clues — but some of the (real-world) examples of cute clues
are really off the wall.
Crosswordese: Alphabetical List of "Crosswordese" Short Words
More than 650 fairly obscure 3-to-5-letter words that occur as answers
to crossword puzzle clues. If you click on any word, you get a list
of common clues for that word.
Wikipedia: Crossword Abbreviations
Long list of clue words that refer to an abbreviation.
The Reverse A-Z List of Abbreviations link given at the end
takes you to a site with an even longer list.
Crosswordese: Clever Clue of the Month
A clue's ending in a question mark indicates that the clue itself is tricky.
60 examples.
In principle, a cryptic crossword clue contains both a (frequently obscure) definition of the answer and separate wordplay that will help you put pieces of the clue together to construct the answer. In fact, specific gimmicks are often used, and it helps to read what people have to say about these tricks.
Peter Biddlecombe: Yet Another Guide to Cryptic Crosswords
There's a table of links to explanation pages:
Introduction (cryptic crossword terminology).
Clue Types (hidden word, multiple definitions, anagram, riddle,
homophone, charade, reversal, subtraction, container, all-in-one,
substitution, moving letter, unclassifiable clues) with examples.
Solving Tips (significance of length of clue, likely length of answer,
punctuation, tense, ellipses, capital letters; finding the definition;
focusing on the grid).
UK References (explanation of British English).
Puzzletome Cryptic Crossword Tutorial
"!" marks a literal clue; "?" marks an off-the-wall clue.
Short list of abbreviations; link to an acronym/abbreviation finder.
A number as a reference to another clue. Roman numerals
as letters.
Clue categories (standard, multiple definitions, anagram,
container, subtractions, hidden word,
homophone, allusion) with examples.
Wikipedia: Cryptic Crossword
See the following two sections —
Section 2: How Cryptic Clues Work.
Section 5: Clues (cryptic definition,
double definition, hidden word, reversal, hidden backwards clue,
charade, container, anagram, homophone, initialism, odd/even clue,
deletion, combination clue, "& lit.", visual clue).
Wikipedia: Crossword Abbreviations
This is the same link as the one cited above under Crossword Puzzles.
Alberich: What is Ximenean Clueing All About?
A clear discussion of fairness of cryptic crossword clues.
The reason for including links to word lists here is that ambitious players memorize as many useful words as they can.
Carlo Fazzari: How To Play Scrabble
Rules of the game only.
Word Buff: Scrabble Strategy Tips
Scroll 80% of the way down the page for links to two useful pages:
Tip #1: six scrabble word lists.
Tip #2: rack management (balance, synergy, tracking).
San Jose Scrabble Club: Two-Letter Word List
All 2-letter words currently acceptable in U.S.Tournament Play
as of 2009, with definitions.
San Jose Scrabble Club: Three-Letter Word List
All 3-letter words currently acceptable in U.S.Tournament Play as of 2009,
with definitions.
Many of these are quite obscure.
Scrabble Australia: Word Lists
These word lists are not all-inclusive, but they are practical
because you have a reasonable chance of remembering the words involved.
2-, 3-, 4-letter words. J,X,Q,Z-words, hooks with J,X,Q,Z.
Bigrams, trigrams. Prefixes, suffixes. Multi-vowel words.
Pseudo-misspellings.
Word Buff: Scrabble Glossary
About 55 scrabble terms. List of acronyms.
This list is worth reading just for the humor in it.
Hasbro: Glossary of Scrabble Terms
About 70 scrabble terms.
Scrabble Australia: Koala's Coaching Clinic
The material on this site is advanced, and the jargon is fairly thick.
There are several links to pages giving specific advice:
Strategy (opening move, reply to opening move,
midgame, 20 tactical tips).
Counting Skills (tracking tiles).
Rack Management (duplicate letters, vowel/consonant balance,
ranking of vowels & consonants, prefixes & suffixes,
playing high-value letters, letters to play away before endgame,
tile exchange).
Anagramming (shuffle your tiles, look for bonuses,
look for suffixes and other common combinations,
relate your tiles to what's on the board,
order your tiles by probable position in a word).
Board Management (parallel plays, extenders, hooks, floaters, swindles).
Endgame (ten endgame tips that it would be hard
to summarize here in simple terms).
Zyzzyva: The Last Word in Word Study
Zyzzyva is a free program that runs under Linux, Mac, or Windows.
Embedded in it are several standard scrabble word lists.
This program has various capabilities, the most important being
the possibility of constructing quizzes that test your ability
to form words from a given rack of letters.
There's a fundamental problem with most of the checkers strategy sites: the board image scrolls off the screen when you scroll down to read the commentary on the board being analyzed. You may have no choice but to print out the whole page or to print out the image of every board you want to understand.
About.Com: How To Play Checkers (Standard U.S. Rules)
Rules of the game only, in an easy-to-read format.
Rule 4: he says "black moves first"; actually, checker sets come
in a variety of colors, and it's the darkest color that moves first.
Rule 10: note that when a piece is kinged, that move is then
terminated (i.e., the new king cannot at that point continue moving
as part of a multi-jump move).
Wikipedia: English Draughts (American Checkers)
Rules of the game only, in detail.
Jim Loy: The Numbered Board
This page has an image of a checkerboard with the squares numbered
in accordance with a nearly universal standard. Print it out.
Most checkers strategy sites (and books) explain moves in terms of
the numbers on this board.
Fred Reinfeld: Checkers Strategy
Learning checkers strategy through concrete examples with
detailed explanations.
There are six long pages; at the end of every page is a Click Here
to take you to the next page.
Fundamentals: standard numbering of the 32 squares on the board;
general examples of moves.
Winning Tactics: forcing your opponent to move; 2-for-1, 3-for-1, blocking;
over two dozen examples.
Spectacular Traps in the Opening: over a dozen examples.
Good Openings: over a dozen examples.
Endgame: the five classic positions; over a dozen examples.
Draw: shooting for a draw when you're down; over a dozen examples.
Derek Oldbury: Checker Strategies
This is an excerpt from the (small) book Move Over by Derek Oldbury,
the UK draughts (checkers) champion from 1955 to 1994.
Most discussions of checkers strategy revolve around the idea
that the key to success is case studies: learn how to handle a lot of
board examples, and you'll internalize an encyclopedia of situations
that will enable you to play a good game.
Derek Oldbury believed otherwise. Specifically for the opening
and the midgame, he developed an overall theoretical approach.
The biggest part of this method is his diagonals:
— D, E, F: defense diagonals
— A, B, C: attack diagonals
— G: attack or defense diagonal
In addition, he developed the ideas of space, time, and force.
(See also the following link.)
Dr. Ralph Joerg Hellmig (Derek Oldbury: Move Over)
This site is in German, but what you will do is search for the phrase
Move Over, which will take you to the link to
the
This book was written a long time ago, so don't be surprised that its
style doesn't obey the various restrictions imposed on current-day writing.
The board diagrams are not Oldbury's originals: they were recreated by
Hellmig (who deserves a lot of credit for resetting this text and
making it available). A consequence of this is that, in contrast to
the usual convention, the pieces move on the light squares,
not the dark ones. Presumably that was done so that the
diagonal-marking symbols ("^") would be visible.
(See also the preceding link & the following link.)
Bob Newell: The Electronic Publications of Richard Pask
This page has a link to Move Over: A Supplement
(a PDF document, 111 kilobytes). It contains commentary and
explanations to complement Derek Oldbury's classic work,
Move Over. It also contains solutions to the problems
Oldbury proposed.
(See also the preceding link.)
Specifically, Duplicate Contract Bridge.
Bridge World: Introduction to Bridge (5 lessons)
These lessons are written in an easy-going conversational style,
and there are practice problems with solutions;
but the coverage is only introductory, not complete.
The Mechanics (the deck; cutting for partners; dealing; bidding;
the play — goals, tricks, procedure; ethics).
Scoring (score sheet; scoring above the line, below the line; vulnerability;
tricks, bonuses, overtricks, undertricks).
Declarer's Play (counting sure tricks; establishing tricks;
establish first & then take sure tricks).
Defender's Play (opening lead; top of a sequence, low from an honor,
4th best, top of nothing, top of a doubleton, inside sequence).
Bidding (bidding as communication; point count — high cards,
distribution, length; opening bid — 1 notrump, 1 of a suit,
pre-emptive bid).
Richard Pavlicek: Bridge Basics (12 lessons)
These lessons are written more concisely than those on the
preceding (Bridge World) site. The page layout is good, but the higher
information density requires more discipline on the part of the reader;
however, more material is covered. There are also practice problems
with solutions.
(1) mechanics of the game, bidding, play; (2) point count, opening bid;
(3) bidding goals, responses to 1 Notrump; (4) more on point count,
responses to suits; (5) rebid by opener; (6) declarer play; (7) overcalls,
takeout doubles; (8) 2 Clubs, weak bid, Notrump structure;
(9) Stayman Convention, minor suit responses; (10) bidding after a raise;
(11) slam bidding; (12) defensive play.
Beyond this there are six quizzes, a page on scoring,
a short page on finessing, and a glossary of about 50 bridge terms.
Richard Pavlicek: Advanced Bridge Lessons (13+11+17+9 lessons)
There is a great wealth of material packed into
these clear, concise lessons.
(Note NT = Notrump.)
==> First, click & read About the Lessons.
The lessons are grouped into four categories:
PartnerShip Bidding (response to a suit bid, rebid by opener,
rebid by responder, opener’s third bid, bidding after a raise,
preemptive bid, weak 2-bid, strong 2-Club bid, suit slam bidding,
2-over-1 auctions, bidding judgment, NT slam bidding,
slam bidding judgment).
Competitive Bidding (NT auction, overcall, takeout double,
defensive bidding judgment, negative double, penalty double,
coping with interference, competing & sacrificing,
balancing bids & doubles, combatting a weak opening, defense to 1 NT)
Declarer Play (card combinations, going with the odds, NT play, suit play,
suit tactics, trump control, first trick tips, suit establishment,
combining your chances, endplays, entries & communication,
timing, counting by declarer, matchpoint strategy, squeeze play,
throw-in play, trump ending).
Defensive Play (NT lead & strategy, suit lead & strategy,
signaling, third hand play, second hand play, defensive trump tactics,
defensive card combinations, counting on defense, when to win or duck).
Beyond this, after each lesson there is a list of helpful exercises
and practice deals.
Karen Walker: Karen's Bridge Library
This site is not really organized so that the lessons follow one another
conceptually closely, but there's a lot of material here.
You may want to print out the Bridge Glossary page for
reference when going through the lessons. The page layout consists
of fairly dense text, so you may find it easier to read if you
resize the page to a narrower width. Some of the lessons have examples,
but there are no exercises as such.
Beginners: 25 topics.
Advancing Players: 22 topics.
Intermediate to Advanced Players: 6 topics.
American Contract Bridge League: 24 Bidding Conventions
In bridge, bidding is a complex communicational language, and there are
different conventions used that specify what
every bid really means.
This site makes available 24 PDF documents specifying 24 different
bidding conventions.
Jeff Tang: Bridge Ethics & Etiquette
Communication during a bridge game involves many nuances.
This site has eight pages that deal with what is and is not
considered acceptable verbal behavior in formal play.
American Contract Bridge League: Laws of Duplicate Contract Bridge
This site presents the full laws governing bidding and play under the
American Contract Bridge League rules.
Wikipedia: Laws of Duplicate Contract Bridge
This site deals only with the treatment of irregularities that arise
during bidding and play under the World Bridge Federation rules.
Bridge World: Glossary
More than a thousand bridge terms defined.
Wikipedia: Glossary of Contract Bridge Terms
A one-page list of more than 600 bridge terms, with definitions
and with cross-referencing links.
Blue Chip MiniBridge (freeware program)
Minibridge is a game for two pairs of players. You play South,
and the computer plays for everyone else. Unlike bridge, Minibridge does
not involve bidding. But it gives you practice in the play of the hand.
Downloadable for free. Requires Windows XP or higher, and 256MB RAM.
American Contract Bridge League: Learn
to Play Bridge Instructional Software
On this page, you can submit a form requesting free instructional software:
Learn to Play Bridge I or Learn to Play Bridge II.
(This page is not always reachable; if you can't connect to it, you can
try again later.)
Last updated March 17, 2011