Bridge for Africa (BfA) December 2025 Newsletter Highlights: Bridge Clubs / Tournaments / Results / Education / Statistics

Compliments of the season to you - we hope you enjoy a great festive season despite your limited number of bridge playing opportunities. In the new year we look forward to seeing you back playing bridge with a vengeance - and hopefully recording your scores at your club using the wonderful BriAn app.

Let me start this, our last BfA newsletter for the year, with a thank you to all the wonderful people at our clubs who make our regular face to face and online bridge sessions possible; we have tried to list all of them on the People page on the BfA website but please let me know if I have missed anyone and I will add them immediately. Sadly this is also a time to remember bridge friends who passed away during 2025 leaving our clubs less vibrant by their absence.

Whether you are staying at home or holidaying away this New Year, you can play against bridge friends old and new around the world in Le Domaine's New Year's RealBridge tournament starting on 31st December at 19h00; contact Louise Gibbon ([email protected] or 0825779942) ahead of time to enter. The cost is just R 25. Tell your bridge friends everywhere to join you! In the meantime, you can click here for details of when BfA clubs will be back in action after the festive season.

Entries are rolling in for the ever popular Hermanus Pairs on 20th and 21st March 2026 which promises to be sold out once again as more than half the slots have already been taken; click here for the brochure. Next confirmed tournament after that is the Darling Pairs on 6th June 2026, the full details of which will be available shortly. The Bedford tournament will probably take place in September or October with the Bidding Box Pairs possibly coming in between; we'll let you know the dates once they are settled. Please let us know of any other 2026 open African tournaments planned so we can bring them to the attention of our players.

Congratulations to the following players for achieving the best average in 12+ sessions at their club during 2025: David Boyes (BfA BBO); Anne Demattais (Constantina Monday); Howard Strauss & Peter Terblanche (Village Monday); Gerard Verhoog (Village Thursday); Anne Demattais (Constantiaberg); Dino Zolezzi (Le Domaine Thursday RealBridge); Dino Zolezzi (Le Domaine Friday A); June Rowan (Le Domaine Friday B); Katinka Steere (Constantina Friday); Ian Glenn (HDBC); Lesley Bownes (Lowveld); Zel Davidson (Simbithi); Mel Boswell (Bateleur); Verne Terry (Stables); Sue & Anthony Goldstein (Hout Bay); Annie Campbell (Tokai Estate) and Bill Wilkie (Le Domaine Saturday RealBridge). Well done to all of them!

There were no Buccaneer interclub teams matches in December. One team has unfortunately been forced to withdraw so Jan Chrobok (082 650-4809 ) is looking for a team to replace them for the rest of the season - which will give you good experience of what's involved before the start of the next season in July. To accustom its players to teams scoring, the Hermanus Duplicate Bridge Club is using IMP scoring for some of their pairs events each month; more details are attached.

Moving to upgrading your bridge skills, here is this month's mini-lesson from Jeff Sapire, a leading South African player and teacher: Downgrade flat hands (in principle): 1S-? Kxx Axx QJxx xxx The book says the jump is 10-11 (assuming you’re playing standard stuff), but a slightly conservative raise to 2S is better. The Bridge Tips page on the Bridge for Africa website provide further useful guidance for players.

The end of December is a good time to use Pianola to review your bridge performance for the year. When you log on, you will be presented with a screen summarising your performance for the previous three months. You can change the start date to 1st January 2025 and you will then be presented with your average score for the year as well as your average as declarer, dummy (which shows how good you are at choosing a partner who plays hands competently), defender who makes opening lead, and defender who does not make opening lead. This will give you a starting point for identifying which aspect of your bridge you most need to improve. If you wish, you can also see your performance with each of your partners. If you scroll down you can view two pie charts, one showing frequency of playing and defending, the other showing your frequency of playing in part score, game or slam (3.19% for me on slams if you want a benchmark). And, while you are logged into Pianola, please check that your name and E-mail address are correctly spelled.

Even the most experienced players amongst us occasionally revoke or lead out of turn. The attached document from BridgeWebs sets out the procedure to follow to prevent revokes from taking place at all, preferably, and to deal with those that do. Memorising that should be one of your New Year resolutions.

Turning to the more mundane (for you maybe but not for me) BfA statistics where we continue seeing growth, during the past 30 days our 15 member clubs recorded the results of 539 tables of bridge on Pianola up 21% from the 443 sessions recorded in January 2025; 1,284 players have played in tournaments at BfA clubs since April 2024 when we started operations. This newsletter now goes to most of the more than 2,415 players in our Pianola player database to assist them to play more and better bridge. The Google map of African bridge clubs has been viewed 11,896 times since it was created to help players to find new places to play. Apart from the Home Page, the most popular pages on the BfA website in December were again the Results, News and Bridge Tips pages followed by the Learn Bridge page.

Bridge for Africa is a non-profit company which assists bridge players in Africa to play more and better bridge by providing Internet marketing, scoring and administrative services to clubs currently ranging from the largest in South Africa's Western Cape, Kwa-Zulu Natal and Mpumulanga to amongst the smallest. You will find previous editions of our newsletters in the news section of the Bridge for Africa website. We welcome enquiries from other African bridge clubs interested in using our services.