Haverfordwest Bridge Club, Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, Wales, UK

March 2015: The handicap system has not really got off the ground and has been discussed at the AGM. The aim of attracting more of the less experienced players, especially on a Thursday, has not so far been achieved. It was suggested that dates be pinned up so that everybody knows well in advance. For the time being Gareth continues to run this.

Gareth Jones (Competition Secretary) has lots of ideas about this and will be putting them into practice.

Following Gareth Jones' intervention, for each Handicap event we are now calculating immediately prior to the event the most up to date handicaps using just the previous year's events.

We are still using the rules that each pair must have played at least five times together and all scores will be included, the handicaps are upped by a factor of 2, also that we need at least 5 tables on a Monday and 4 on a Thursday to run a Handicap competition.

Scorebridge will only work these out for players recorded as members, with what it thinks is a WBU (or EBU) number (if you don't have one, Scorebridge accepts '999999'). This occasionally leads to pairs not being included in a handicapped ranking.

Average rankings for pairs, that use all events since the laptop was commissioned in May 2012, will be updated occasionally but no longer form the basis of the handicaps:

** update March 2014 **. We have reduced the requirement to four tables for Thursdays as there have been poor attendances recently.
Please attend on a Thursday and get yourself a Handicap prize!

Mid-January 2014. The last three handicapped events have all been won by the winners of the main event. While not wishing to detract from their achievements – after all, they beat off the rest despite their handicaps, we would like some of those who don’t achieve the limelight quite so often to be more in the reckoning. So, with the agreement of the committee, I’m upping the handicaps by a factor of 2 for future events. So those top pairs will have to win by an even more massive margin if they are to keep those wine bottles coming in.

Handicapped results are calculated simply by subtracting your average from 50 and adding that to your percentage score.

The averages are calculated on all the results for pairs who have played together at least five times since records started on our current computer. They can be calculated in various other ways which can be discussed by the Committee in the light of any comments received.

For the time being, to see how it goes, handicap prize events are diaried in for alternating second Mondays (to avoid Bank Holidays) and first Thursdays of the month, as long as there at least five tables. As we have just had our first event of the new season (25th April 2013) the next two will be on Monday 13th May and Thursday 6th June, with two bottles of wine for the winning pair of each event.

Your comments will be appreciated (use the "Contact Us" page in the Main Menu). For example, how often do you think we should update these averages? What should be the minimum number of events for a pair to get a handicap (currently five)? Should a pair’s best and worst scores be included in the average? Would you prefer not to have this list of names on the website? Would you prefer different prizes? Are you happy with the dating of handicap events? etc.

Page amended by Webmaster March 2014