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

The Dragonfly and Stables Bridge Clubs in KZN are the latest clubs to start using the BriAn scoring app, bringing to 13 the number of clubs using the app under the auspices of BfA.

Well done to the Paterson Team (Torquil Paterson, Kathy Botha, Yvonne Malherbe, Bridget Pote) on winning the 2025 Bedford Teams tournament. The Gillespie team was second followed by the Malan team in third place. You can click here to view the results. David Girdwood and his Bedford team, ably assisted by Eileen Ellis as TD as well as Geoff Ellis and Elmare Maurin, are to be congratulated on organising yet another slick and friendly annual tournament with delicious goodies at every turn.

Next up is the Life4Leo Charity Bridge Drive in Cape Town on 28th October. If you know of any other bridge events, including charity tournaments, taking place anywhere in Africa in the months ahead, please send me details so we can publicise them and so swell the turnout.

The Calendar on the BfA website has been updated to include all 21 weekly sessions organised by BfA clubs. These include our Thursday and Saturday RealBridge sessions as well as our Tuesday afternoon BBO sessions - you can find these by logging on to BBO and selecting Competitive, All tournaments, and entering BfA in the Search bar. Anyone can play in our online bridge! You do not have to be a member of any club or organisation so please join us - it's nice to see players from across the country and beyond matching their bridge skills against those elsewhere!

Congratulations to the following players for achieving the best average in 3+ sessions at their club during September 2025: Angela Brunt (BfA BBO); Kate Tipper and Eila Steyl (Constantina Monday); Anthony Goldstein and Wilson McLeod (Village Monday); Jane Waters (Village Thursday); Elaine Guinsberg and Avril Kadey (Constantiaberg); Colette Powell (Le Domaine Thursday RealBridge); Dino Zolezzi (Le Domaine Friday A); Jeanette Shea (Le Domaine Friday B); Ashleigh Vergunst (Constantina Friday); Ian Glenn (HDBC); Mike Field (Lowveld); Zel Davidson and Sandy Miller (Simbithi); Pam Caldwell (Tokai Estate); Carina Wiid and Frans Schutte (Bateleur); Sue and Anthony Goldstein (Hout Bay); and Clyde Mallinson (Le Domaine Saturday RealBridge). Well done to all of them! 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.

The 2025/2026 season of the Buccaneer league is now in full swing; you can click here to view the results of and log after the second round.

Moving to upgrading your bridge skills, here is this month's mini-lesson from Jeff Sapire, a multiple South African Champion, who has represented South Africa many times in international tournaments and now teaches classes, runs workshops, and plays ‘pro’ bridge online: Rebidding 1NT with a singleton is generally not a good idea, but there are times when it may be best. E.g. x KQJx AQJx Jxxx You 1D-1S; ? Rebidding 2C may get your side to the best spot (clubs or diamonds), but typically the sequence 1D-something; 2C shows 5 diamonds and 4 clubs (or 5+5, or 6 and 4, or 6 and 5). I’d definitely rebid 1NT. If partner passes, or raises NT, all should be okay. The one risk is that partner will be entitled to expect a balanced hand, and will rebid some number of spades with a 6 card suit. But, as the Nike ad goes, ‘just do it’. You can also use the ever-growing bridge tips page on our website to further improve your bridge.

For those of you playing at clubs where the BriAn cellphone scoring app is used, here is a productivity tip: when entering names into BriAn at the start of a session, just enter each player's initials separated by a blank and a list of players having those initials will appear on the screen so you can make a choice.

Here's another story about the benefits of playing bridge. Following on from early 21st century research from the University of California, Berkeley, which showed the health advantages of bridge playing, Polish researchers looked into how bridge playing could delay the onset of dementia and, particularly, Alzheimer’s disease, by teaching patients at the Alzheimer’s Centre in Warsaw to play whist. The patients, who initially couldn’t count to ten or keep their cards properly arranged, had three hours of bridge lessons a week and, after six months, could count to 13 and 40 and confidently play whist. Furthermore, the whist group also had other forms of therapy, including dancing, while a control group also had these other therapies but no bridge lessons at all; after one year, the loss of cognitive ability in the bridge group was more than two times lower than that in the control group.

Turning to BfA statistics, during the past 30 days our 15 member clubs recorded the results of 545 tables of bridge on Pianola; 1,213 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 2,210 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 10,843 times since it was created. Apart from the Home Page, the most popular pages on the BfA website in September were 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.

As usual we look forward to your comments and feedback. We look forward to seeing you playing at our clubs and in our online sessions during October.