Newsletter Highlights: Schedule / Results / Education / Laws / Statistics

The next tournament, organised by Cape Town's Bidding Box Bridge Club, is a pairs tournament taking place on Sunday 18th May; you can click here for more details; we look forward to seeing many of you playing there. Thereafter, the next tournament takes place in Langebaan on Monday 11th August; you can click here for preliminary details. I also look forward to seeing many of you at the ever-popular Bedford teams tournament scheduled for the weekend of 27th September. Please note that all 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.

Judy Wulf and her HDBC team, with Andre Truter as tournament director, are to be complimented on a slickly run 2025 Hermanus Pairs tournament with three competitive sessions interspersed with delicious interludes. Congratulations to the eventual winners, Maureen Narunsky and Imtiaz Kaprey, closely followed by Phil King and Collette Stott with Diniar Minwallah and Omphemetse Moedi coming third. You can click here to view the full results. The event was generously sponsored by PSG (the South African financial services company, not the French football club) while Escape Wines provided mouth-watering pink refreshments at the prize-giving. Those of you with a long planning horizon should set aside the weekend after Easter 2026 for the next Hermanus Pairs tournament.

The results from all BfA club sessions, face to face and online, are posted on our Pianola website and can be accessed by clicking on the Results menu item. You can click here to view the April 2025 Buccaneer Teams Competition results and log which shows the Pinelands 1A team still leading League 1 and the Peninsula team heading a tight race in League 2. Bidding Box 3 continue to lead League 3 and South Cape League 4. Soon clubs will be invited to enter the 2025/26 Buccaneer competition.

Congratulations to the following players for achieving the best average in 3+ sessions at their club during April 2025: Andre Wagenaar (BfA BBO); Liz Cork and Anne Demattais (Constantina Monday); Anthony Goldstein and Wilson McLeod (Village Monday); Ashleigh Vergunst and Graham Spolander (Village Thursday); Avril Kadey (Constantiaberg); Betty Hall (Le Domaine Thursday RealBridge); Dino Zolezzi and Betty Hall (Le Domaine Friday A); Val Willemse and Julie Coulson (Le Domaine Friday B); Valmai Bond and Jane Horovsky (Constantina Friday); Ilse Smart (Hermanus Duplicate Bridge Club); Heather Campbell (Tokai Estate) and Di England and Bridie Bullen-Smith (BfA / Le Domaine Saturday RealBridge Pairs). 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.

Congratulations are also due to Louise Gibbon, who runs Durban's famous Le Domaine club, for celebrating her 80th birthday with a four table, family bridge tournament scored with the BriAn app; I'm sure we would all like to be able to brag about that!

Moving to upgrading your bridge skills, here is this month's mini-lesson on hand upgrading from top bridge teacher Jeff Sapire: Overcalling at the 3 level: (2H) 3D What are the minimum requirements? I recommend strongly that you only do it with an opening hand and a fair 6 card suit. e.g. xx Kxx AQxxxx Kx. On the Bridge Tips page, now one of the most popular on the BfA website, in addition to sections on bidding, declarer play and defence, we now include a new section on opening leads.

In our last three newsletters we summarised the procedures to be followed when a common rules infringement takes place. This month we look at what happens when there is a call out of rotation and once again New Zealand Bridge has produced a flowchart which is attached to this E-mail or can be accessed from the TD Corner page of the BfA website. Of course, when there is a recognized tournament director officiating, then their rulings prevail and on the TD corner we are including case studies showing how a TD would deal with a complaint. Sadly, at a recent event one pair disputed the TD's ruling and simply abandoned the tournament without considering the impact on the other players; as you would expect, the missing miscreants have been banned from playing for a year.

The Scottish Bridge Union (SBU) recently lamented that out of 4,500 current members, less than 40 are under age 31, of which only 11 are under age 20, whereas Chess Scotland has over 5,000 members, with roughly half being juniors. At first glance this would indicate that bridge - in Scotland at least - is in terminal decline and about to be replaced by the less sociable board game. As I pondered further, this conclusion became more cloudy. Impecunious students would not be able to afford SBU membership, while SBU offerings such as daytime and weekend tournaments hold little appeal for players in fulltime employment with growing families; for them kitchen bridge with the kids or twenty minutes snatched on BBO would be much more appealing. Maybe bridge unions should be feeding bridge tips to player families to prepare the adults for retirement and the kids for games between lectures? I asked ChatGTP whether golf was suffering in the same way as bridge: "In summary, while there was a brief decrease in the average age of golfers during the pandemic, the long-term trend in Scotland shows an increase in the average age of golfers, posing challenges for the future sustainability of the sport." No wonder Scotland's premier golf club at St Andrews is called the Royal & Ancients' Golf Club!

Turning to BfA statistics, during the past 30 days our member clubs recorded the results of 514 tables of bridge on Pianola; 939 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 1,750 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 8,638 times since it was created. Apart from the Home Page, the most popular pages on the BfA website in April were the Results, News and Bridge Tips pages, with the Learn Bridge page a little way behind.

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 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.

We look forward to seeing you playing at our clubs and in our online sessions during May.