November newsletter highlights: Seeff Festival of Bridge / BBO games to start at 09h30 / Warwick Wealth Bidding Competition / Holiday Season Bridge

As usual there's plenty of bridge related activities coming up that will be of interest to bridge players and beginners, not just in the Western Cape, but around the rest of the country so read on. More information can be found in the attachments to this E-mail; by clicking on the links in the text below; or by visiting the WCBU website or our Facebook page.

South Africa's final red point event for the year is the ever popular Seeff Cape Town Festival of Bridge, comprising a teams and a pairs tournament and taking place at Cape Town's Green Point Bridge Centre in mid December; visitors from upcountry and overseas are particularly welcome to join the local players and enjoy our hospitality. More details can be found on the attached brochure or you can click here to enter.   

The WCBU's next BBO Charity Pairs event, this one in aid of the Peninsula School Feeding Scheme (PSFS), will take place on Friday 2nd December 2022 at 10h00. Just log on to BBO, select Virtual Clubs - South Africa and you will find the event listed. Our September tournament in aid of PSFS raised sufficient money to provide 3 children with 2 meals per day for a year; this being the season of giving, let's see if we can raise even more this time round!

Starting on Monday 2nd January 2023, the WCBU's BBO sessions on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday mornings will each start at 09h30 rather than the current 10h00. Players should please TAKE NOTE. The time for the Saturday afternoon session is unchanged.

There will be the usual BBO sessions during the December / January holiday season, other than Boxing Day 26th December, and the Tuesday Grand Slam Club will also continue to meet each week in the Bridge Centre. However, the other face to face bridge clubs will close from Friday 16th December 2022, when the Seeff Cape Town Festival starts at the Bridge Centre, to Friday 6th January 2023 inclusive. Trumps starts again on Saturday 7th January followed by all the other clubs. There will be a grand opening of the Wednesday Bridge club on 11th January. Note that there will NOT be the monthly Personal Trust Bridge and lunch on the last Sunday in December nor will there be our monthly Personal Trust Zoom lecture given by one of our local experts. Both of those will resume in January.

Moving to ways of improving your bridge, our next beginners' bridge 103 course starts on 11th January 2023 using Zoom and RealBridge; the course brochure is attached and aspirant players from around the country are encouraged to register for this highly praised course. There were problems loading the recording of Craig Gower's fascinating lecture on covering onto the website; apologies for that! The next of leading bridge teacher Jeff Sapire's brief bridge tips: New suits by either Opener or Responder are 100% forcing to game.

After more than three months, the WCBU is coming second to Links Face to Face in the Saturday afternoon countrywide competition; the log can be found on the results page on the WCBU website. The December edition of the  the WCBU's Warwick Wealth October bidding competition is attached to challenge you; again there's a R 250 for the winner.

Finally, some more statistics. In the past two months the results from more than 662 (up from 628) tables of face to face and online bridge have been recorded in the Pianola database on the WCBU website where players can compare and analyse their performance while also giving them the opportunity to compare their results in the two formats. Since the beginning of January 2022, the WCBU website has been used by 6,088 visitors who read 46,291 pages of information during 20,060 visits. Of the visitors, who live in 64 different countries, 84% reside in South Africa, 5% in the United Kingdom, 3.6% in America and 1% in Australia; 44% live in Cape Town, 22% in Gauteng and 2% in Hermanus. As you would expect, the home page was the most popular page over the past month, followed by the results, Bridge Clubs, Lectures and Lessons pages. Nearly 53% of visitors use a computer; 36% use a cell-phone; and 11% a tablet. And that's enough statistics for this month!