Hemel Hempstead Bridge Club

Chairman’s AGM Report 2016-17

During the past year we have run Duplicate Bridge nights on Mondays and Tuesdays but we ceased running Bridge on Thursdays on 22nd December 2016 and this has meant re-scheduling most of our competitions.

We did hold an Open Evening when 18 non-members turned up and a few of these have continued to play Bridge at the Club.

All evenings use duplimated boards and I would again like to thank David Blasebalk for running the Duplimate machine.

During the year we started Supervised Play Sessions on Thursday afternoons. These are aimed at people who can play Bridge but want to improve. We have received very positive feedback about these sessions, but attendence numbers remain low. My thanks go to Anne & Cliff Short, Lesley & Derek Peers, Roger Edmonds, John Pelley, Pat Henry and myself who have done a great job “supervising”.

Following a large vote in favour, we are going to comence using a tablet based automatic scoring system. We plan to start running this system on Monday 24th July 2017.  Tuesday evenings will follow a little later and I’m sure this will prove to be a big improvement to ourevenings Bridge.

We ran our open Swiss Pairs event on Sunday 5th March. It again proved successful thanks to Derek Peers for organising the event and David Blasebalk for duplimating all those boards,

My thanks go to Lesley Peers and Anne Short for organising the Christmas Party. They both put in a tremendous amount of hard work to make the event a such a success. Again we had a number of fun items included in the Bridge, which added to the enjoyment. As we no longer run Bridge on Thursdays, we may have to think of something different for 2017.  

We are planning a few changes to our competitions. The Byron cup will be a knock out teams event without a pre-qualifier and can be played at home. Teams can include non-members. 

The Individual competition will be the best scores with six different members played on either Monday or Tuesday evenings and the winner will still receive the Hemmings Trophy.

Finally a big thank you to all those who have served on the Committee; Cliff Short,  Margaret Ainsworth, Lesley and Derek Peers, Joanne Turner, David Blasebalk, Roger Edmonds, and Naomi Gibbs.

I would also like to thank Derek Gowlett for organising Tuesday evening’s bridge;  all our Directors and Scorers;  Roger Edmonds for the web site; Anne Short as our membership secretary. The Club couldn’t function without their help.

David Stimson