This is the sixth monthly bridge update from the Western Cape Bridge Union (WCBU). Further information on all the bridge topics covered can be found on this website. As you read on, you will also see how we are responding to your feedback in our player survey earlier this year.

The annual Western Cape Pairs Tournament (see brochure) is scheduled for 23rd and 24th October 2021; in this new era of borderless bridge, players from around the country are encouraged to click here to enter this event. The Impala Open, also a red masterpoint event, will take place on Sunday, 21st November 2021.

International and local wealth management company, Warwick Wealth, is sponsoring a monthly R 1,000 prize for the player(s) who achieve the best average score during September in our weekly, at 13h30 on Tuesdays, pairs event, as well as a R 300 prize for the player with the median average score. More details can be found on the flyer.

The WCBU has started running weekly 10 board mini tournaments on BBO on Wednesdays at 20h00. These have drawn new players, especially non-retirees with busy daytime schedules, and we encourage more players of all ages to take part. The cost is just BBO$ 1 per player. Just go to Virtual Clubs - South Africa after 19h30 and you will find the tournament. The results are posted on the WCBU website but no masterpoints are awarded. We are considering running mini tournaments on other days of the week as well.

In previous newsletters, I have mentioned the success of our Friday tournaments for online duplicate novices. These go from strength to strength and we now have a pool of nearly 80 players taking part. Carol Stanton's Zoom / RealBridge bridge course for beginners is going well with more than 40 beginners taking part. The brochure for the next course, which starts on Wednesday 29th September, is attached and we encourage beginners to sign up early as we are limiting the numbers. In the meantime, Carol is looking for experienced players to volunteer as mentors to the players as they start out playing hands on RealBridge each week. You can contact Carol ([email protected]) for more details.

Congratulations to the winning Bjerregaard team and runner-up Zimet team in the “A” section of the August edition of the Personal Trust JM Bridge RealBridge Teams competition. In the "B" section, the Cragg and Nick teams  were winners and runners up respectively. The attached brochure gives details of the September competition, where generous prizes will again be on offer and which will take place on Thursdays 2nd, 9th, 23rd and 30th September (but not the 16th). To enter, please contact Mark Kenyon ([email protected]).

Personal Trust is also a sponsor of our new Zoom bridge workshops for intermediate players, the first of which will be conducted by Carol Stanton on Sunday 5th September - that's next weekend - from 14h00 to 16h00 entitled How to Interfere over 1NT, while the second, What to do if Opponents Interfere over your 1NT (Lebensohl), takes place at the same time on 26th September. You can go the workshop announcement in the News section on the WCBU website on the day of the workshop for the Zoom link and to download the workshop notes.

When I'm not playing bridge - or writing bridge newsletters - I am an amateur futurologist, scanning the news for pointers as to where the world is headed and publishing a short report each month to assist recipients to plan their corporate and personal lives. One of the key trends is greater mass data storage and mining which I discussed in a bridge context in our last newsletter. What other trends could impact bridge?

Well nowadays Artificial Intelligence (AI) and supercomputers are increasingly being used to analyse all that data. On the recreation front, IBM came up with a computer years ago that could play chess as well as the top grandmasters and, more recently, an AI program started doing the same with Go. Magnus Carlsen and others striving for the chess top spot routinely use AI programs in training for their big matches. With bridge it's a bit trickier because there are four players, one of whom is your human partner. BBO has probably come closest with their robots but they still have their flaws; just try leading towards KJx in dummy (North) and the robot (West) is likely to play her ace if she has it, whereas a canny human might play low. However, the day is probably not far off when you can use software that kibitzes your bidding and play in real time and "whispers" instructions in your ear so your performance is on a par with that of the great Benito Garozzo.

Another trend is that the population of the world continues to grow larger and older as people live longer. At the same time fertility rates in most countries are dropping with more and more nations seeing population declines. A related trend is that a combination of automation and AI is increasing both productivity and unemployment. All this should mean that the number of people with time to play bridge is increasing. Yet here we are struggling to attract new players into the game.

One of the reasons might be growing inequality, a worldwide problem. Maybe only the wealthy can afford table fees and Internet bridge? Perhaps the answer is to deliver a couple of packs of cards and some whist tutorials in the vernacular to each and every informal dwelling in the Western Cape. As bridge takes off, we would probably like to imagine gang membership and burning tyres on the N2 forgotten in the heat of making a tricky slam in much the same way that the Roman Caesars of old distracted the masses with bread and circuses. If only it was so easy.

Of course, the biggest problem we face today is climate change. We can all do our tiny bit to stave it off by not travelling by car and plane to play in tournaments. The only problem with staying at home and playing online is that in South Africa - and Australia - we have an energy minister who is wedded to burning coal and gas to produce the electricity our computers consume (along with carbon dioxide and PM2.5 soot particles) instead of tapping the sun and wind. As the weather gets more exteme, we are going to be more and more reluctant to venture out for face to face bridge.

Globalisation has meant that the Corona Virus has spread worldwide at a rapid rate, while at the same time the Internet allows bridge players everywhere to meet and compete online. The usage statistics from our website, which uses software developed by a UK company run on an Amazon server located somewhere in the USA, provide a snapshot of globalisation in action. Of our 762 August website visitors who read 5,201 pages of information, 81% live in South Africa and 54% in Cape Town, 12% in Gauteng and 4% in Chicago. Visits have been recorded from people living in America (8%), the United Kingdom (4%), China (3%), Germany, Australia, Canada, France, Greece and the Netherlands.

While we're on the subject of our August website statistics, the most popular pages were, not unexpectedly, the home page and the results page. The other popular pages were the the JM Bridge club page (where players go to enter RealBridge events), News and Calendar pages, as well as a page about the KZNBU.  Some 50% of visitors come directly to the website either because they know the address or have an E-mail link; 47% come as a result of a Google search; and just 3% via links on the SABF, Hermanus, Pianola and other websites. Some 63% of visitors use desktop or laptop computers; 30% mobile phones; and 8% tablets. That's enough statistics for this month!