August 2024 Highlights: Bridge Schedule / New Bedford Date / Club Results / Bridge Tips / Dealing Machine / Finding African Bridge Clubs

This is the fifth newsletter of Bridge for Africa (BfA) which assists bridge players in Africa to play more and better bridge. We welcome your suggestions on how, together, we can better achieve that seemingly simple objective (and thank you to those that have already contacted us with ideas).

Next up is the Bedford Teams competition, the dates for which have been changed to 11th to 13th October 2024; click here for details. This is my favourite annual tournament, with the friendly, but competitive, bridge and generous local hospitality more than compensating for the long drives some of us have to make in order to participate. Contact David Girdwood ([email protected] or WhatsApp 083 651-0100) to enter or to request assistance in forming a team or even to finding a lift. Hopefully, we will see more similar tournaments taking place, especially come summer when the swallows return. If you know of any please let me know so we can promote them on the BfA website and in our E-mails.

The number of players, from across the country and beyond, playing in BfA's online BBO tournaments on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 14h00, has shown steady growth but we would like to see even more players taking part. These are now 24 (up from 21) board sessions costing just BB$ 1.50 per player - and you don't need to belong to a club, union or federation in order to take part from the warm winter comfort of your home. Due to the flower show taking in the Hermanus Duplicate Bridge Club venue on Mondays 16th and 23rd September, there will be additional BBO sessions at 14h00 on these afternoons. To play in any of these, from 2 hours, up to 10 minutes before the start time, just go to https://www.bridgebase.com/v3/login?cmd=tourneyList&style=hp:BFA or search on BBO for BfA.

In addition to our two weekly BBO sessions, BfA now organises a weekly session on RealBridge on Saturday afternoons at 14h00 costing just R 25 - please contact Rod Pienaar ([email protected] or whatsapp 079 673-5077) ahead of time to enter and play.

Congratulations to the following players for achieving the best average in 3+ sessions at their club in August: Ilse Smart (BfA BBO); Patty Geddes and Kim Wray (Constantina Monday); Patty Geddes (Constantina Friday); Anne Demattais (Constantiaberg); Wilson and Jeanne McLeod (Village Monday); Jane Waters and partner (Village Thursday); and Kevin Middleton (Hermanus Duplicate Bridge Club). It's nice to see new names bubbling to the top each month. Incidentally, you can click on the Competitions button while viewing results in Pianola to see the details of the other contenders in each of these monthly club competitions.

The number of clubs using the BriAn scoring app, including now clubs outside the Western Cape, is growing and we hope to include the monthly winners of these new clubs in future newsletters.

Moving to upgrading your bridge skills, here is this month's bridge tip from top bridge teacher Jeff Sapire: These days, many of us play 1C can be short, and so to support clubs you should have 5. But in competitive auctions you can’t wait. 1C (1H) ? Kx xx Jxxxx A10xx Bid 2C. Each week we also include two new tips in the Pianola results E-mail sent to players in all the above competitions and more; all those sent out to date are shown on the Bridge Tips page on the BfA website.

I sometimes worry that bridge learning focuses too much on bidding to the neglect of declarer play and defence. Back in the 1970's, British and French bridge internationals Terence Reese and Roger Trézel, collaborated to write six little bridge books which have now been combined into two easy to read volumes, Accurate Cardplay and Imaginative Cardplay; If you click here and select Read an excerpt you can download a free copy of their chapter on elimination play where they teach ordinary bridge players like you and me to use elimination plays rather than take a finesse which might lose. This is a technique we should all learn in order to get more tops!

Some of you aspirant tournament directors (TDs) appear to have missed the link in our June newsletter to the new English Bridge Union (EBU) TD video series which you can access by clicking here. Click here for a document listing the latest EBU rules for announcing and alerting which everyone should heed.

This week we took delivery of a Duplimate VI dealing machine, thanks to the negotiating skills of Mark Kenyon in sourcing it and to the generosity of Wilson and Jeanne McLeod for financing it. BfA is now able to provide clubs and tournaments in the Western Cape with pre-dealt boards at no cost for the use of the machine by Bridge for Africa clubs. Incidentally, if you have ever wondered how a dealing machine works, then click here to watch a fascinating YouTube video showing a Duplimate dealing machine in action.

Still on the wonders of technology, I recently asked four search engines the same simple question: "Give me a list of African bridge clubs outside South Africa with contact details". Sadly Google, Perplexity AI (they have just raised investment of US$ 250 million) and Ecosia (they plant trees to offset their emissions) simply listed a series of South African bridge web pages, comfortingly each with BfA's Clubs page at the top of the list. The only search engine that seemed to understand my question was SearchGPT which listed bridge clubs in Ghana, Nairobi and Port Louis and the bridge associations in Egypt and Morocco. Even this was disappointing as none of the website links listed worked and they were missing many of the African bridge clubs shown on our African Bridge Map page which people are somehow finding because it's been viewed more than 6,000 times.

However, when I asked SearchGPT for clubs by individual African country, it started giving me names not listed in its previous search result; of course, you will have heard that the GPT products are renowned for their creativity - last year, for instance, I coaxed ChatGTP into composing a wonderful 6 verse ode, Shakespearean style, to my favourite bridge partner - and I strongly suspect some of the Zimbabwean and Ugandan clubs SearchGTP listed, as well as the gmail addresses given for several clubs, are simply figments of its powerful imagination. Just who can you trust in this day and age of fake news and, now, maybe, fake bridge clubs? However, as a result of the search I did make first contact with the flourishing Nairobi Bridge Club.

Turning to some more reliable bridge facts, during August our member clubs recorded the results of 363 tables of bridge on Pianola; 584 players have played in tournaments at BfA clubs since the middle of April when we started operations. This newsletter now goes to 850 players, mostly on the mailing lists of BfA member clubs, to assist them to play more and better bridge. If you wish to unsubscribe from this newsletter, then click on the link below.

As usual we look forward to both your comments / feedback and to encountering you at BfA face to face clubs or at our online sessions in the days ahead.