We are very much looking forward to our final bridge 125th anniversary special event on Friday 19th June with Zia Mahmood, the celebrity bridge player.
Zia has been coordinating closely with our team on the arrangements, and I am sure it is going to be a great day.
As we all know, Zia has been one of the most exciting, successful (and entertaining) players in recent times and I am sure we are all hoping that some of the Zia magic will rub off on us.
The Bridge Summer Party is on 9th July – click here for the poster and event details. The date was fixed to be a little later than usual in order not to clash with the Zia event. It promises to be a lively and colourful occasion and should be great fun.
The bridge calendar has been recently updated and contains new details for some matches that were scheduled more recently e.g. the tennis and bridge fixture against Hurlingham.
We have developed a brochure outlining the activities of the bridge section. It is designed primarily for new Members but should also serve for existing Members who might be interested to play bridge and would like to understand more about our range of activities. Please feel free to circulate it to Members interested to play bridge at the Club.
We had a good showing at the RAC Centenary Cup on Monday 18th May. Our team was Henryka and Peter Bonnor-Moris, Diane and Malcolm Bricknell, Ralph Evers and Ron Wood, and Kate Blake and Philip Howard. We finished a very respectable second place behind a strong performance from the MCC and very much enjoyed the RAC hospitality.
We have had a series of friendly matches with some finely balanced results. Our home match against Queens on 6th May resulted in a good win to Roehampton Club of 50 imps. Our match against Oxford and Cambridge on 12th May was a very close affair. Roehampton Club was narrowly ahead at halfway but eventually lost by just 11 imps. The match against RAC Woodcote on 4th June was similarly very close with our team also narrowly losing by just 9 imps.
After lengthy consideration, we decided to reinstate the Thursday Evening Duplicate as an explicitly Gentle Duplicate session. The number of boards played on Thursday evenings will be reduced to an expected 18, to give more time for players for each round. The sessions will be scored as usual, will feature on Pianola and will also count for EBU masterpoints. After further consideration of EBU policy, we now plan to use a code that does count towards players NGS rankings, to give people the chance to gradually improve their rankings over time.
Gentle Bridge is aimed at ‘helping Beginners and Improvers to develop in a supportive, learning environment’. The extra time is intended to allow for a more relaxed game and the opportunity to more easily ‘learn as you play’ by being able to discuss points of interest between rounds. For that reason, we are welcoming strong players to play, but only with weaker partners, so they can contribute to the learning process but without ‘intimidating’ Beginners and Improvers by being part of a very strong pairing.
We want to keep the Bridge Room as tidy as possible. Could players kindly remember that after their sessions are finished, they should put used glasses on to the trolley provided, remove any waste paper and put boards and bidding boxes etc back to where they belong.
Bridge is a game where politeness is a requirement – not an option as in most sports. The Roehampton Club Bridge Room has very high standards in this respect which are frequently favourably commented on by our guests. It makes for a pleasant ambience in which we play and contributes to the enjoyment of the game. Occasionally, more so in the distant past than recently, there seem to have been some isolated incidents of rudeness which are frankly unacceptable. Let’s please aim to keep a consistently friendly atmosphere as is the norm for us at Roehampton Club.
Malcolm Bricknell, Bridge Chair
