September 2024 Highlights: New Bridge for Africa Club / Bridge Schedule / Club Results / Bridge Tips / Tournament and Pianola Guides / Statistics

This is the sixth 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).

The next tournament to look out for is the Bedford Teams competition from 11th to 13th October 2024. So far there are 16 teams entered, the perfect size for a good friendly contest; we'll let you know the result. While we are on the subject of tournaments, we have prepared a BfA Bridge Tournament Planning Guide to assist those of you organising one day or weekend club or charity tournaments; the guide is based on the hard won experience of a number of tournament organisers and you can contact me if you would like a copy. BfA can also assist by advertising your tournaments in our E-mail communications and on our website to attract more entrants.

This morning we learned the good news that Durban's Le Domaine Bridge Club, the largest bridge club in KwaZulu Natal, is the latest club to join the BfA network of bridge clubs. With remote assistance from Neil Armitage of the Constantiaberg club in Cape Town and Victor Lesk, the developer of the BriAn app, in England, Louise Gibbon and her team methodically mastered the use of the BriAn cellphone scoring app to run their multisession weekly tournaments. Like other clubs around the country, Le Domaine suffered the blow of losing their only Bridgemate expert and had to find an alternative scoring system at short notice. Feedback is that the players, too, just love using BriAn and other KZN clubs are thinking of following suit!

Le Domaine and BfA were already partnering in organising RealBridge tournaments each Saturday afternoons at 14h00. These cost just R 25 and you can contact Rod Pienaar ([email protected] or whatsapp 079 673-5077) ahead of time to enter and play. Still on online bridge, the number of players, from across the country and beyond, playing in BfA's 24 board, BB$ 1.50 per player BBO tournaments on Tuesdays (that's this afternoon for those wanting a game today) and Thursdays at 14h00, has shown steady growth but we would like to see even more players taking part. Contact Judy Wulf ([email protected]) or search on BBO for BfA.

Congratulations to the following players for achieving the best average in 3+ sessions at their club in September: Riekie Louw (BfA BBO); Anne Demattais and Liz Cork (Constantina Monday); Katinka Steere (Constantina Friday); Craig Paxton (Constantiaberg); Ian Glenn (Hermanus Duplicate Bridge Club); Peter Terblanche and Howard Strauss (Village Monday); John Bryant (Village Thursday); and Richard Moore and Dino Zolezzi (BfA / Le Domaine Saturday RealBridge). It's nice to see new names on the leaderboard 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 is growing and we hope to feature 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: An opening 2C shows 23+pts OR a hand with 9+tricks (but not a 9 card solid suit, you still need a hand of about 16+pts). An example of the 2nd hand type would be AKQJxxx AK Kx x -you can count 9 sure tricks, and so need just a little (a red queen) to make game. 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.

In our last newsletter I gave you a link so you could download the first chapter - on elimination play - of Terence Reese and Roger Trézel's very readable Accurate Cardplay book. In like fashion, you can click here to download a free copy of the PDF version of the first chapter - on how to minimise risk during declarer play - of the companion volume titled Imaginative Cardplay. You can click here to download the new easy to use BfA Pianola User Guide for making the best use of Pianola to analyse and improve your play; we look forward to your feedback.

BfA's new dealing machine is now in operation dealing hands for sessions in the Cape Town area at no cost to BfA clubs for its use. The machine, which can be operated from a computer or a cell phone, creates PBN hand record files which can be uploaded to BriAn and Pianola. Please contact me if your club is wanting to create and use pre-dealt hands.

Turning to BfA statistics, during September our member clubs recorded the results of 352 tables of bridge on Pianola; 628 players have played in tournaments at BfA clubs since the middle of April when we started operations. This newsletter now goes to more than 870 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 6,300 times since it was created.