October 2024 Highlights: Updated Bridge Schedule / Club Results / Bridge Tips / Learning Bridge Online / Statistics

This is the seventh newsletter of Bridge for Africa (BfA), a non-profit company which assists bridge players in Africa to play more and better bridge; you will find previous editions of our newsletters in the news section of the Bridge for Africa website where you will also find details of the services BfA provides to clubs and players.

Congratulations to the aptly named Bridger team (John Bridger, Annelie Kachelhofer, Prue Gillespie, Esther Goosen) from Bloemfontein on winning the 2024 Bedford Teams tournament, pipping the Ponting Team (Toni Ponting, Ros Hulley-Miller, Sue Prior and Sugar Rhodes) from the Lowveld by just fractions of a percent. The more local Patensie Team came third. David Girdwood and his committee, as well as tournament director Clive Harrison from St Francis Bay, are to be congratulated on an extremely efficiently run event with amazing, mouth watering catering between sessions. No wonder it's one of my - and many others' - favourite tournaments each year.

Next up on our tournament schedule is probably the ever-popular Hermanus Pairs on 4th and 5th Aprilr so put it in your 2025 diary now. If you know of any other bridge tournaments, including charity events, taking place anywhere in the country in the months ahead, please send me details so we can publicise them.

We have updated our online bridge offering with our Thursday online bridge session now at 09h00 on RealBridge in partnership with Durban's Le Domaine Bridge Club. As with the 14h00 Saturday RealBridge sessions, you can contact Rod Pienaar on 079 673 5077 beforehand to arrange entry at just R25 a session. Meanwhile our weekly 24 board BBO sessions continue at 14h00 on Tuesdays and you can register on BBO from 2 hours, up to 10 minutes before the start time, by using this link:

https://www.bridgebase.com/v3/login?cmd=tourneyList&style=hp:BFA

or via Competitive, All tournaments, and entering BfA in the Search bar once logged into BBO. Should you not have a partner then you may play with a Robot - although real people are much preferred! Anyone can play in our online bridge sessions and you do not have to be a member of any club or organisation in order to take part.

Congratulations to the following players for achieving the best average in 3+ sessions at their club in October: Ilse Smart and Karen Emary (BfA BBO); Michelle Greenwood (Constantina Monday); Tony Popplestone and Sulaiman Samuels (Constantiaberg); Ian Glenn (Hermanus Duplicate Bridge Club); Howard Strauss and Peter Terblanche (Village Monday); Fiona Heany (Village Thursday); and Clyde Mallinson (BfA / Le Domaine Saturday RealBridge). It's nice to see new names on the leaderboard each month. We plan to feature monthly winners from Le Domain's other competitions in future newsletters. 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.

Moving to upgrading your bridge skills, here is this month's bridge tip from top bridge teacher Jeff Sapire: Partner 1C-? KJx xxx Ax KQxxx Jumping to 3NT (13-15) promises stoppers in the other 3 suits. Don’t jump straight to 5C, 3N may be ok. Temporise by bidding 1D, to see what partner rebids. It’s safer than it looks. Same if partner opens 1D-? KJx xxx KQxxx Ax Bid 2C. If partner raises clubs, you can always go back to diamonds. 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.

Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat and soon our grandchildren will be released from school for several weeks of twiddling their thumbs on their cell-phones. Click here is our guide to Internet bridge teaching resources so they can make productive use of their phones and their free time to learn how to play first whist and then bridge at their own pace using a series of challenging but fun to use bridge web pages and apps. By the end of the holidays they should be ready to take on their grandparents round a bridge table. Of course, there's nothing to stop adults enjoying learning online too. We welcome your feedback and ideas on other web resources players can use to learn and improve their bridge.

The holidays are also a time for travel to distant places where you might like to use some of your leisure time to play bridge with the locals. The Clubs and Bridge maps pages on the BfA website provide session and contact details for the vast majority of bridge clubs, not just in South Africa, but also in the rest of Africa; let us know if we have missed any. The BfA clubs in Cape Town, Hermanus and Durban, particularly, have red carpets ready to roll out for visitors and swallows - and you can kill two birds with one stone by learning first hand how to use the cell-phone based BriAn bridge scoring app as you play at Cape Town's Village and Durban's Le Domaine clubs. We can even help you if you then decide you want to use BriAn to score sessions at your home club!

Turning to BfA statistics, during October our member clubs recorded the results of 362 tables of bridge on Pianola; 703 players have played in tournaments at BfA clubs since the middle of April when we started operations. This newsletter now goes to just under 1,000 players, mostly on the mailing lists of BfA member clubs, 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 news and bridge tips pages. The Google map of African bridge clubs has been viewed 6,620 (up from 6,300 at end September) times since it was created.

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.