December 2023 newsletter highlights: Bridge Results / Bridge Tip / More on Pianola and BBO / SABF Subs due in January

Compliments of the season to you; we hope that 2024 is a great year for you and your bridge!

More information on many of the topics in this newsletter can be found in the attachments to this E-mail; by clicking on the links in the text below; or by visiting the Western Cape Bridge Union (WCBU) website.

We have once again reached that strange time of the year when we plan for the year ahead while at the same time mulling on the year past. As I do so, I would like to acknowledge the hard work of the WCBU committee members, our tournament directors, the bridge club committees, the Bridge Centre staff, bridge teachers, our sponsors and our often forgotten book keeper and auditor - during 2023 you have brought joy and, with those tricky hands, frustrations to our lives. I am sure we are all also extremely grateful to all you regular bridge players who keep returning to the fray determined to do better next time round. And our thanks particularly go to those of you who flock to our Friday fund raising tournaments on BBO; this year you raised thousands for good causes. We look forward to seeing you all back in action next year.

Over the holiday period the Bridge Centre will be closed till Wednesday 10th January; Keurboom and the Hermanus Duplicate Bridge Club will reopen on 8th January; and BBO sessions will continue as usual. The first 2024 BBO Friday Charity Tournament, in aid of Helderberg and other hospices, takes place on 5th January; we will remind you again nearer the time. Due to a lack of interest, the WCBU has decided to discontinue the WCBU BBO sessions held on Mondays and Saturdays.

Looking a few months ahead, Congress 2024 again takes place in Cape Town with the teams competition scheduled from 25th to 29th February and the pairs from 29th February to 3rd March, while the red point WCBU Hermanus Pairs, which received rave reviews from players this year, takes place the weekend after Easter; the flyer is attached here. We look forward to seeing and entertaining even more of you upcountry folk at both those tournaments - as well as all our local players, of course.

The 2023 edition of the Cape Town Festival of Bridge earlier this month was another roaring success attracting players from far and wide. Hennie Fick and Duncan Keet won the Cape Town Festival Pairs, closely followed by Andrew Brooke and Leif Stabel and Alon and Arras Apteker. In the teams, the A Section was won by the Stabel team, with runners up the Apteker team. The B section was won by the Balkin team and the C section by the Keet team. Congratulations to all of you and thanks to all who played or were involved in the organisation. You can view the full results here. (For those of you interested in the full details of the pairs, including the hand records, go to the Results page on the WCBU website and then click on one of the Festival Sessions for 17th and 18th December on the calendar; the Traveller and Hands tabs take you to those and Pianola even allows you to replay hands to test your skills against those of the participants).

One of the players sent us a nice but instructive E-mail: Having recently played in the Festival tournament, I’d like to congratulate the organisers on a well run event. Sure, there was an issue on the first day of the Pairs with entries not having filtered through from the SABF website and on the second day with non-attendees, however this was efficiently rectified, and the movement started without much delay. These things happen, and it was rewarding to see the organisers handling the challenges they encountered without issue. One area of improvement would be for the results to be uploaded to the website sooner and, if possible, immediately after each session.

On the whole, it was a competitive yet friendly event. However, I have to say why do some ‘good’ players have to have such an attitude? E.G. North (usually) enters the result into the Bridgemate and passes it to East to confirm the result by pressing ‘Accept’. So, why did one North insist on entering the score, pressing ‘Accept’ himself and then showing the opponents the percentage? Or, not even showing the opponents the Bridgemate at all!

Etiquette. Let’s not lose this. Which brings me to a quote from the recently introduced changes to the Laws. Specifically, Law 73. D.2. “A player may not attempt to mislead an opponent by means of a question, remark or gesture; by the haste or hesitancy of a call or play (for example hesitating before playing a singleton)”. One player, who was playing with a professional, hesitated for far too long after a Club was led, having singleton AC in hand, opposite QC 9C doubleton on table. Next time the opponents may not be as forgiving!

Turning to bridge skills training, the WCBU is finalising plans for a club tournament director training course starting towards the end of January 2024; we will notify those who have expressed interest as soon as the final details have been decided.  While the course will be open to players from around the country, preference will be given to players from both WCBU affiliated and non affiliated clubs in the Western Cape as part of our expanding the game in this region.

This brings us on to the next of leading bridge teacher Jeff Sapire's brief bridge tips: 4441 hands with 11 points should open the bidding. E.g.  KJxx  Kxxx  x  Axxx  It doesn’t get to the (the Rule of) 20, but with chances to find a fit in one of 3 suits, it’s a must. In the meantime, the Hermanus Duplicate Bridge Club arranged for 50 local players to attend a weekend long advanced bridge workshop given by Glen Holman with each of the four sessions ending with participants playing pre-dealt hands. The workshop was very well received and the WCBU is planning to organise similar workshops in Cape Town during 2024.

On a more mundane but important note, 2024 annual SABF subs of R 250 per member should be paid in January to your club or by EFT to the WCBU FNB account 62926125263 with your SABF number, name and subs2024 as reference - make sure you don't forget these. Speaking of the SABF, the SABF board will stand down in early 2024 which means, under its constitution, that a meeting of the Members' Committee, with delegates from each of the unions, will take place to elect a new board. If you feel you have the requisite skillset and would like to serve South African bridge at the highest level, then you should approach your union committee or the WCBU to arrange nomination. The SABF constitution allows for each union to submit more than one nomination and also include nominees who live outside the area of the union.

With bridge clubs closed for the next couple of weeks, you should have plenty of time to explore the Pianola software that manages the results from most of our pairs tournaments, starting with replaying festival pairs hands as I mentioned earlier. If you are one of the 818 players recorded as having played in one of our tournaments during 2023, then I will shortly be sending you a personalised E-mail giving details of how you can register on Pianola so you can log in and see all your results since January 2021, including an analysis of your strengths and weaknesses and of your performance with each of your partners - maybe your favourite partner shouldn't be your favourite after all!

When Covid hit, many of us gratefully flocked to BBO to continue playing bridge. And when the all clear was sounded, some of us stayed online and some of us returned to face to face. But, what many of us don't appreciate are some of the side effects of BBO and RealBridge. For starters, geographical and bridge jurisdictional boundaries disappeared as we started playing not only with players in other towns in the country but from around the world - what bridge and legal rules apply when there is a dispute involving players from, say, South Africa, Poland and Australia in a tournament organised by the WCBU and played on BBO servers located in Paris? Every time a foreign player plays in our tournaments BB$ flow into South Africa and into our welcoming coffers and every time we play in a Scottish tournament or, in fact, in any of the games at every level taking place 24 hours a day on BBO, BB$ flow abroad. These last few months have seen us glued to our screens watching rugby and cricket world cups - these days bridge too has become an online spectator sport attracting hordes of kibitzers from around the world. And this has led to the advent of a new breed of highly paid bridge professionals, each with their online fan clubs on social media. And while my young grandson would scoff at the thought I could pick up useful playing tips from watching Siya or AB playing rugby or cricket, I (and you) can certainly pick up valuable tips from watching Zia in action.

We have used the holiday lull to update the WCBU website including providing a more extensive list of Western Cape bridge clubs, both affiliated and not. Those of you fascinated by WCBU bridge website statistics will be over the moon to know that the Google Analytics program is again monitoring every little thing it can about every visitor to the WCBU website - except, alas, details of people looking at the pages displaying session results as these are created dynamically by the Pianola software. Over the past month, the website has been used by 694 visitors who read more than 3,979 pages of information. Of the visitors, 50% live in the Western Cape, 32% in Gauteng, 10% in KwaZulu Natal, 3.5% in the Free State and 3% in England. As you would expect, the Home page was the most popular page, followed by the Results, News, Bridge Clubs, Upcoming and Bridge Lessons pages. Some 39% of visitors use a computer; 56% use a cell-phone; and 5% a tablet. In the past two months the results from 540 (up from 402) tables of face to face and online bridge have been recorded in the Pianola database on the WCBU website. And that's enough statistics to keep you mulling till our next newsletter!

As always, we look forward both to your comments / feedback - we would like more of both of these please - and to encountering you at the WCBU virtual and real bridge tables in the days ahead. In the meantime, stay safe and enjoy your bridge - and the rest of the festive season.