Bridge for Africa (BfA) February 2025 Newsletter Highlights: Schedule / Results / Education / Laws / Statistics

There's barely space for a couple more pairs at the venue for the 2025 Hermanus Pairs Tournament, which place on 4th and 5th April; contact Judy Wulf ([email protected]) to secure one of them. Plans are being finalised for a tournament in Cape Town on 18th May; details will be posted in the News section of the BfA website. The ever-popular Bedford teams tournament is tentatively scheduled for the weekend of 27th September. Please note that these tournaments are open to all players and none requires that entrants be members of the SABF or any other union. If you know of any other open 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.

You can click here to view a schedule of the weekly online and face to face sessions organised by BfA client clubs where numbers are growing week by week - and could swell even more now that Graham Spollander is following the Hermanus Duplicate Bridge Club example and organising Cape Town workshops to help advanced rookies transition to confident club players; you can just WhatsApp 065 893-6215 to sign up. From Monday 24th February 2025, the Village Bridge Club relocated its 13h15 Monday and 09h00 Thursday sessions to the Bergvliet Methodist Church Hall. Nearer the time, we will send you a reminder of an extra BBO session scheduled for 14h00 on Wednesday 26th March. The results from all these BfA club sessions are posted on our Pianola website and can be accessed by clicking on the Results menu item.

You can click here to view the February 2025 Buccaneer Teams Competition results and log which shows the Pinelands 1A team still leading League 1 with the Peninsula and Hermanus teams tussling for supremacy in League 2. Congratulations to the following for achieving the best average in 3+ sessions at their club in February 2025: Ilse Smart and Carren Emary (BfA BBO); Anne Dematteis and Liz Cork (Constantina Monday); Farid and Lorraine Motamed (Village Monday); Roger Bulgin and Paddy McAllister (Village Thursday); Ken McKenzie (Constantiaberg); Gerda van Zyl and Mignon Leigh (Le Domaine Thursday RealBridge); Dino Zolezzi and Betty Hall (Le Domaine Friday A); Tommy and Lynn Thompson (Le Domaine Friday B); Doreen Dawson and Vicky Falls (Constantina Friday); Ian Glenn (Hermanus Duplicate Bridge Club); Annie Campbell (Tokai Estate) and Bill Wilkie (BfA / Le Domaine Saturday RealBridge Pairs). Well done to all of them! And especially nice to see new names popping up each month. 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 mini-lesson on hand upgrading from top bridge teacher Jeff Sapire: When you pick up a balanced hand with a very good 5 card suit – AKJxx KQJxx AQJxx AJ109x - add on a point to start before bidding. So Kxx Kx AQJxx Jxx is a 15 point 1NT opening bid. Compare that hand to Kxx Kxx AJxxx Kx with the same point count. The potential of the first hand is far greater. The Bridge Tips page is proving to be one of the most popular in the BfA website, especially now that you can download a printable PDF listing all the tips published in our results E-mails to date.

There was an interesting exchange recently between bridge legal experts when a declarer playing 3NT found dummy had run out of cards at trick 10 - what penalties should be applied for not counting cards before playing and, at the previous table, for mixing the cards, probably while post morteming; if you take proper care this should never happen. And while we're on basic housekeeping matters, be sure to shuffle your cards before returning them to the board if a hand is passed out; when you open a hand neatly sorted it often indicates it either wasn't bid or was the subject of an interesting post-mortem at the previous table where it was played.

As we mentioned last month, tournament directors with all the latest rules at their fingertips are in short supply these days with sessions frequently taking place where no experts are present. Under these circumstances our normal reaction when a player leads out of turn is to just tell them to take their card back. However, as you can see from our summary of the rules pertaining to leads out of turn, declarer has a number of other options and the errant leader should have no objections if declarer chooses to follow their rights and, maybe, make extra tricks as a result. Better by far is to get in the habit of leading face down, at the same time asking the table "My lead?". We have created a new TD Corner section on the BfA website from which you can download PDF versions of these rule summaries as well as the full EBU rules. As with the insufficient bids covered last month, you clearly don't have to worry about incorrect leads when playing online!

Turning to BfA statistics, during the past 30 days our member clubs recorded the results of 574 (up from 443) tables of bridge on Pianola; 866 (up from 829 at end January) players have played in tournaments at BfA clubs since the middle of April 2024 when we started operations. This newsletter now goes to most of the more than 1,650 players, mostly on the mailing lists of BfA member clubs, in our Pianola player database to assist them to play more and better bridge. The Google map of African bridge clubs has been viewed 8,044 (up from 7,779 at end January) times since it was created. Another very popular page is our Learn Bridge page listing Internet resources for learning and improving your bridge.

This is the twelfth newsletter of Bridge for Africa, 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 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. We welcome enquiries from other African bridge clubs interested in using our services.