December 2024 Highlights: Bridge Schedule / Bridge Results / Bridge Tips / Compensation Method / Statistics

This is the ninth newsletter of Bridge for Africa (BfA), a non-profit company which assists bridge players in Africa to play more and better bridge by providing Internet scoring and administrative services to clubs ranging from the largest in the Western Cape and Kwa-Zulu Natal to amongst the smallest. You will find previous editions of our newsletters in the news section of the Bridge for Africa website.

Although it is still months away, entries are already rolling in for the 2025 Hermanus Pairs Tournament to be held on 4th and 5th April; you can click here to find more details of the tournament, including how to enter. Please note that it is open to all bridge players and there is no requirement to be a member of the SABF or any other bridge union in order to compete. If you know of any other bridge tournaments, including charity events, taking place anywhere in Africa in the months ahead, please send me details so we can publicise them and so swell the turnout.

BfA's weekly online bridge offerings - BBO on Tuesday and RealBridge on Thursday and Saturday afternoons - will be suspended over the festive season with our last session of the year today (19th December) and our first session of 2025 on 7th January. Most BfA face to face clubs will also be closed during that period, opening again from 6th January 2025 onwards. However, for those of you who won’t be out dancing till midnight on New Year's Eve, Le Domaine Bridge Club is organising a festive RealBridge session that night; you can Whatsapp Louise Gibbon (+27 82 577-9942) for details.

As a result of the club closures, many of us will have to resort to playing social bridge for the next two weeks and will be complaining about an endless succession of bad hands. Here's a tip from the lively Louise McIntosh in Hermanus on how to make amends for all those Yarboroughs. After each hand has been played NS and EW should each tot up their combined high card points; the difference should be multiplied by 20; and the product added to the score of the pair with the fewer high card points. So, for example, if you have N (16 points), S (10), E (8) and W (6), then NS (26) - EW (14) = 12 and 12 x 20 = 240 is added to the EW score. This evens things out and does mean you no longer have to be lucky in love to compensate you for the bad cards you hold - though that's still a highly desirable state of affairs.

You can view the results of the November Buccaneer teams competition by clicking here. Congratulations to Katinka Steere for achieving the best average in 3+ sessions at the Constantina Friday Club in November. For a change, in December, we have arranged for Pianola to determine the most improved player over the past six months at each club: Pam Kent (BfA BBO); Michelle Greenwood (Constantina); Ken McKenzie (Constantiaberg); Heidi Venter (Hermanus Duplicate Bridge Club); Mandy Pitt (Village); Di Beningfield (Tokai Estate); and Neville Mitchell (BfA / Le Domaine RealBridge Pairs). Well done to all of them! In our competition to find the most improved player across all the sessions played at all BfA clubs in the past six months, the December winner is also Neville Mitchell who increased his average by 8.49%. 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 competitions.

Moving to upgrading your bridge skills, here is this month's bridge tip from top bridge teacher Jeff Sapire: Double fits usually play better. You have: SKxx HKx DAJxxx Cxxx Bidding is 1S-2D; 3D-? Initially the hand was worth an invitational 3S, but now that there’s the known double fit in S and D, so jump to 4S. 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 tips sent out to date are shown on the Bridge Tips page on the BfA website, which we have revamped to make it easier to use. I can't tell you how many tops my partners and I have achieved recently because opponents did not stick to the rule that aces are for taking kings and queens and should not be played on "fresh air". As declarer with Kx in a suit, for instance, my eyes light up each time the opponent on my left leads the ace of that suit. And when you are the defender sitting with the ace of a suit over dummy's king, be disciplined and keep your ace till that king is played.

I share an Amazon Kindle account with my bridge playing son so I thought to buy him a couple of Kindle bridge books for Xmas that I too could read when he wasn't looking. As I searched the Amazon catalogue of bridge books using my laptop I discovered that on the pages describing many of the Kindle versions of bridge books the linked words Read Sample under the pictures of the book covers gave me free access to a useful chapter or two of each book. So I tried clicking on my favourite Victor Mollo's Bridge Quiz Book and his Card Play Technique, written with Nico Gardener, and lo and behold the first few pages were there in all their useful glory. Another interesting looking book I stumbled across quite by accident was Tournament Bridge for Advanced Players by Ken Casey which starts off with a cynical look at the hands dealing machines prepare for tournaments with most finesses designed not to work; I'm not going to recommend you read that. Please let me know if you too go searching and find any other instructive free samples we can recommend to fellow bridge players.

This is the time of year when we will all be making resolutions to bid and make every slam that comes our way in 2025 at the very least. However, it should also be a time to pause and look back - sadly, as we remember fellow players who passed away in 2024, and gratefully for the bridge club organisers, tournament directors, teachers - including Jeff Sapire who provides us with a bridge tip each month - and, most important, our opponents and partners who have made our bridge sessions a reality in 2024.

Turning to BfA statistics, during the past 30 days our member clubs recorded the results of 410 tables of bridge on Pianola; 766 (up from 706 at end November) players have played in tournaments at BfA clubs since the middle of April when we started operations. This newsletter now goes to most of the more than 1,550 players, mostly on the mailing lists of BfA member clubs, in our Pianola player database to assist them to play more and better bridge. As you would expect, the most popular pages on the BfA website were the home and results pages, followed by the bridge tips and Learn Bridge pages. The Google map of African bridge clubs has been viewed 7,328 (up from 7,029 at end November) times since it was created.