The Monday evening session this week is a heat of an EBU Sim Pairs event. Come along and see how you compare with players across the country. Play starts at 7pm as usual. There is a printed booklet with commentary on the hands afterwards (available in paper form and on the EBU website: click here). Table money for members is £5 - visitors are welcome to join us.

Our annual Chester Congress takes place over the weekend of 24 & 25 January and is fast approaching. You can see information about it here. You can play just one day or both days as you prefer. Saturday is Swiss Pairs (a good introduction to those wanting to try this type of event for the first time) and Sunday Swiss Teams.

Both days consist of 2 sessions (around 48 boards) with a break in the middle, and are run for us by EBU Senior Congress TD James Vickers.

Hi everyone, monthly prize winners for December are as follows:

Monday………..........Ian Blackhurst

Wednesday…………Elaine Dunham

Friday………………  Simon Anderson

Congratulations to you all.

This is just a reminder on when the club is open/closed over the festive period.

There will be no bridge on Friday 26 December (Boxing Day) - no Friday afternoon pairs or Friday evening social bridge. Apart from that, pairs and funday/social sessions will run as normal - including Wednesday afternoons on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, and including Tuesday BBO sessions on 23 and 30 December. Bridge lessons stop after the lessons on 18 December and start again the week commencing 6th January.

Have a merry Christmas and happy new year!

The Waterworth Cup is the County's annual pairs championship.

This year's event will be held on BBO on Friday 16th January 2026, starting at 17.30.

It is intended that the event will be run as an all-play-all Howell competition of around 36-39 boards using standard pairs scoring with a mid-session break of 20 minutes and no robots allowed! The precise format will be determined by the number of entries
received and the limitations of BBO.

Full details and the online registration form to enter can be found on the county website: https://www.bridgewebs.com/merseysidecheshire/

As always, green points are awarded to the top half of the field. Also, the top three eligible pairs also get the chance to represent the county in the national pairs championship for the Corwen Trophy in May.

It feels like Christmas now as we had our party last night (Sunday 7 December). No mince pies or mistletoe took part, but those there enjoyed a game of bridge, fun quizzes/games and a delicious meal. Here are photos of 1st and 2nd pairs in each direction:
    

It is good to be able to report that Deva was well represented in the Merseyside & Cheshire County team that played in the Tollemache Cup qualifier at the weekend (8&9 Nov). The competition is an EBU inter-county championship for teams of eight and the weekend involved 30 counties playing 98 boards in 2 heats. M&C came =6th in their heat (equal with London who have a very much larger pool of players to choose from) and missed qualifying for the final by just 5 IMPs. 

As you can imagine, it was a high standard of bridge and so the county being so close to qualifying is a remarkable achievement (although not as good as qualifying!). It is also a good result for Deva because 9 of the 10 players who played for the county were Deva members. Namely: Pope, Prothero, Murphy, Hopkins, Stone, Roberts, Merrill, Foster & Hampson. Well done to all of them!

Bob Graham was a long standing member and teacher at the Deva. He founded an individual competition in the mid 90s and also kept the club's original garden which is why the current garden is named after him.

The 2025 final of the competition took place last night (Thursday 30 October) with qualifiers taken from the Bob Graham Ladder based on results on Monday evenings for the club year September 2024 to August 2025. The final is a tournament of 19 boards with each player playing 1 board partnering each other finalist. It was a complicated movement and a bit like musical chairs as well as a game of bridge. Congratulations to the winner, Mo Borley who has her name engraved on the cup, and to Jeff Angove who was runner up.