Goodness me- end of the year already, where has it gone?
As you know this has been a very eventful year for our club with several significant changes, some of which are described in this newsletter, and some are yet to happen. I am sure, although with some reservation,, that we have made the right choices and can look forward to an exciting 2013.
REFLECTIONS ON THE FUTURE OF THE CLUB.........
I believe we turned a corner at the AGM on 13 November and can look ahead with growing confidence. The key decision was to put the unhappy period as a limited company behind us and revert to being simply a club. Particular thanks to Sue Osborne for proposing the motion, and Wendy Pattinson for seconding it.... and to those who attended for voting overwhelmingly in favour.
As a result we need no longer wallow in arcane arguments about the relationship between the Articles of Association and Constitution. A revised version of the latter will appear on the web site soon and there will be an opportunity to put the finishing touches to it when we next have a general meeting (see below). I believe it sets out a systematic and sensible approach without being over-bureaucratic.
One change you should be aware of is that we now intend to go back to a more conventional financial year of April to March, and to hold our AGM in April or May. This makes a lot of sense to me, but if you have views we want to hear them.
There was a fair amount of rejoicing when members voted to re-affiliate to the English Bridge Union. I could hear metaphorical champagne corks popping! I confess to some disappointment that only two fifths of our members voted either way on this important issue. However now the decision has been taken we will want to make the most of it. I have already received welcoming messages from the Warwickshire County Bridge Association. We have set up a small sub-group to look at our involvement in events and sessions, both internal and external, and some important new ideas should flow from that.
Phil Shorey has been masterminding our discussions with Cawston Parish Council on the idea of sharing the proposed Cawston Community Centre, and his brief report on a fast changing situation appears elsewhere in this newsletter. We hope to reach agreement in principle with the Parish Council by the end of the year or very early next so that we can put a full proposal to you as a basis for a vote at a general meeting. I am enthusiastic about the idea, but we must not be bounced into an agreement which does not serve our best interests. As Phil says, Cawston will not happen unless three quarters of those who vote are in favour of it.
The new monthly competition, a very bright idea from Chris Malthouse, will start in January, and is again described elsewhere. You don’t have to do anything to enter – anyone who plays in any of our regular sessions (other than on Saturdays) will automatically participate. If you like seeing your name in lights (or at least in the local paper) there will be a real incentive to play as often as possible to maximise your chances.
We now have a Management Committee of seven people – Terry Bradbury, Anne Carrington, David Hicks, Chris Malthouse, Wendy Pattinson, Phil Shorey and myself. David is particularly welcome as our new Secretary, replacing Judith Kleiner who will be much missed. We are also sad to have lost Clare Dixon and Terry Leary (who has worked unstintingly on the legal, financial and procedural issues).
We all work hard for the good of the club. For example I recently received 156 e-mails about Rugby Bridge Club in 15 days! In future we intend to make greater use of sub-groups onto which we will co-opt other members of the club with particular skills or experience. We really do want to open up the running of the club to a wider range of people.
Most important of all is that you should feel able to come to any member of the Management Committee with your comments, suggestions and ideas. New ideas are the lifeblood of the club, so keep them flowing!
Peter Langley
TEACHING AND DEVELOPMENT OF SKILLS
We are keen to provide a route for beginners and improvers to develop their experience and bridge playing skills. The programmes for beginners and improvers are published on the website and are available to view at all sessions. Most of us would benefit from revision and developing new skills and all are welcome to attend any of the sessions on Saturday morning, at 10am. Improvers are encouraged to attend the Wednesday evening session at Hillmorton Ex-Service Men’s Club where experienced players are on hand to help with bidding and play.
The Friday afternoon session at Clifton is proving very popular with eight tables becoming the norm.
NEW MEMBERS
We have had a large increase in applications for new members:
Terry Bradbury organised an event in July which he called "Bridge in the Street". Two tables of bridge played matches in the Clock Towers shopping mall while Terry and others engaged interested passers-by in conversation. Ken Merritt was one such passer-by and after a chat with Terry he decided to enrol himself (as did others) on our Beginners class starting in September, ultimately, resulting in his joining RBC as our 150th member. Ken is already displaying the enthusiasm for the game which we all share.
Terry was also responsible for the recruitment of Dick Stevenson, Wilma Kiernan and Peter Way. All three are members of the Dunchurch Diamonds league team which originated many years ago from the group that play at Ray and Jean Gaunt’s in Dunchurch. As the Gaunts are planning to move out of the area shortly they were recruited to RBC as a means of continuing local bridge after the Gaunts’ departure. Terry hopes to include several more new members from this source once the Gaunts’ move becomes imminent.
Terry was recently awarded the CBE for services to bridge! As he was personally the prime player in recruiting ten new members in 2012 Peter Langley, our Chairman, awarded him the title of Club's Best Enroller!
We welcome Peter Harris as a returning member, while Richard & Ruth Hammond, Maria Smyth, Adam Bradbury, Lolotte Tolbutt, Theo Schilderman and Janet O'Connor are all new members. Enjoy your bridge!
DATES FOR YOUR DIARY
Festival of Christmas Trees 2012 - Rugby Bridge Club
For the past eight years St Andrews Church in the centre of Rugby has held the Festival of Christmas Trees where local charities, schools and organisations enter trees to promote themselves and, more importantly, to raise money for local charities. This year the proceeds are being donated to The Children’s Air Ambulance.
For the fourth year Rugby Bridge Club will be entering their tree ‘7 No Trumps’, so hope you are able to come along to see it and all the beautiful Christmas Trees that have been entered.
This event has been growing in popularity and the display of trees is wonderful to see. All the visitors to the church have the opportunity to vote for their favourite tree.
The festival is open:
Friday 7 December from 10.00am – 4.00pm
Saturday 8, 15, 22nd December 10.00am – 4.00pm
Sundays 9, 16, 23rd December 12.00pm to 4.00pm
CHRISMAS BUFFET
Tuesday December 18th
We are holding our Christmas Social Evening at Sacred Heart Bilton. This is an informal evening with ‘fun’ bridge, so players of all standards are welcome.
The buffet is supplied mainly by contributions from our members so all offerings, (finger food), mince pies, quiches, nibbles, sausage rolls, dips etc are most welcome. Please let Wendy Pattinson know what you will be bringing. A list is available at all sessions. Tea, coffee, white and red wine, and soft drinks will be served. The festivities will start at 7pm with a short bridge session followed by the buffet, then more bridge.
WARWICKSIRE PAIRS COMPETITION
Tuesday 15th January
On Tuesday 15 January 2013 we will be holding a heat for the Warwickshire Pairs Championship. The format will be exactly as usual and there will be no extra cost, but all pairs who score 50% or more will qualify for the final to be held at the West Midlands Bridge Club on Sunday 17 February 2013. Playing in the final is of course, optional.
On Thursday 21 February 2013, there will be a heat for the Warwickshire Mixed Pairs. Again, the format will be as usual and there will be no extra cost, but all pairs who score 50% or more will qualify for the final to be held at the West Midlands Bridge Club on Wednesday 29 May 2013. Again, playing in the final will be optional.
ANNUAL DINNER
Friday 18th January 2013
The annual dinner will be held on Friday 18th January at The Dunchurch Park Hotel
at 7.30pm.
Cost is £10 per member (subject to length of membership) and £20 per non-member.
Please indicate your menu choice, number of guests, and payment method by:-
a) email annecarrington@ymail.com
b) post to Anne Carrington, (RBC), 3 Hardy Close, Rugby CV22 7JA
c) hand to a Committee member
MENU
To Commence.........
(a) Smooth chicken liver parfait with toasted brioche & homemade fruit chutney
Or
(b) Chunky leek and potato soup
To Follow .......…
(c) Roast sirloin of beef served with Yorkshire pudding, horseradish cream and traditional roast gravy
Or
(d) Spinach, brie and walnut Wellington with a wild mushroom and tarragon sauce
Or
(e) Cajun spiced salmon on a bed of wilted greens with crushed baby new potatoes
To Conclude.....
(f) Apple and mixed berry crumble with clotted cream
Or
(g) Classic lemon tart with crème fraiche
Tea or Coffee
CAWSTON COMMUNITY HALL – UPDATE
Just a few words to keep everyone ‘in the loop’! Negotiations are still ongoing and a solicitor has been employed by the Bridge Club to examine a draft agreement between Cawston Parish Council and Rugby Bridge Club. When this agreement has been finalised and the committee are happy with it, we will hold an extraordinary general meeting at which everyone will be asked to vote on whether or not we commit to it. A 75% majority of those voting will be required for us to go forward.
It is fair to say, that we cannot see any other possibilities of a permanent home for Rugby Bridge Club, at the present time!
Be assured we will keep everyone updated with new developments.
Phil Shorey
PROPOSED PLAYER OF THE MONTH AWARD
A new competition for the New Year! The Rugby Player of the Month award – YOU automatically qualify and there is no extra cost!!
The purpose of the competition is to provide a means whereby all members can compete in a monthly competition and:
a) encourage members to take part in more sessions;
b) allow as many members as possible to demonstrate their bridge progress;
c) recognise and reward consistently good play.
Scope The competition will be open to every member, at all weekly sessions apart from Wednesday evenings, Troughers, Allott and Saturday mornings. We have decided to exclude Wednesday evenings because there is a training element to this session.
Process Scoring will be based on EBU master points.
Player of the Month and the Year
The member with the highest aggregate number of points in each calendar month will be declared Player of the Month within the club and in the local press. Every year the member with the highest number of points will be awarded the Lwow Spoon (donated in memory of Rom Ecker – Lwow was the name of the town he came from and he didn’t want the trophy to be named after himself).
Review
This is a new venture for the club and we want to get it right. We will trial the competition in December and will monitor the competition during the first six months (from January 2013 onwards) and will if necessary make changes to the format. Any comments from club members will be taken into account. However the principle of aggregating performance across our sessions for a calendar month will remain.
INCOME AND EXPENDITURE -HOW SHOULD WE RUN OUR CLUB?
It is now 12 months since I helped to organise the Club’s Annual Dinner at Dunchurch Park Hotel, yet we still seem to have a deal of resentment over the subsidy of guests to that event. Perhaps it is time to take a look at how the Club raises the money for its activities and how it spends that money
The purpose of our Club is to provide venues and organise Bridge sessions for our members. We aim to please our members by having a variety of sessions at different venues at different times and on different days of the week. These sessions have evolved over a long period of time, many of our members attend only one session and then do not even come every week. Yet on the other hand we have a dedicated band of followers coming three or four times a week. The more sessions we run, the greater is our cost as we pay for hiring the rooms on a daily basis, the more days we run, the greater is the cost. The Club has taken the view that we are providing a service and as long as there is a demand we will run a session. When we started our Friday afternoon session we didn’t know if it was going to be viable, but it has now become a successful generator of profit as well as happiness!. The Club’s main source of income is from table money, the income from subscriptions is negligible, many of us pay more in table money in a week than we do in subs in a year, in fact some of us will now be paying more to the ebu in P2P than we pay to the club in our subscription! So, you see anything that we can do to get more bums on seats at our bridge sessions brings in more money to the Club. Once we have paid our standing costs every extra £2 of table money is pure profit. If we want to make money or keep down our table money charge we must maximise our attendances.
Now back to the Annual Dinner. The Management Committee had discussed the venue for the Dinner and it was felt, by some, although not all, that a higher standard of décor, seating and meal would attract more members. Some had indeed said that they were not coming again if it was at the Masonic Hall. However it was going to cost more money at Dunchurch than at the Masonic. The higher cost could possibly deter some members from coming, especially if it was going to cost £25 for their partner, and some members weren’t going to be allowed to come on their own!
The decision to subsidise the dinner and make the price attractive for partners as well as members was done for sound commercial reasons Anything that makes our players want to play more bridge at our Club, and anything that makes the wives, husbands and partners happy that we are coming out to play bridge the better it is for the Club’s income. Friendship and bonhomie cemented in an environment away from the bridge table helps in the family understanding of our bridge playing life. I make no apology for doing all that I could to encourage family participation. At a cost of £20 for a subsidised ticket the guest was not getting a meal that could not bought cheaper elsewhere. My believe is that we got more guests, keeping more members happy and getting more actual members attending than would have happened otherwise.
If we compare our actions to those of other Bridge Clubs in the area, such as Lutterworth or Ray Gaunt’s, some of our members see these as more generous organisations whose members are not whingeing when they have chosen to miss out on a free meal. However there is no such thing as a free meal, we are all paying for it by coming to bridge more often!
Peter Augustus
REAL ALE AT THE EX-SERVICEMENS CLUB
One of the pleasures of playing bridge on a Wednesday or Thursday Evening at the Hillmorton Club is the opportunity to drink cask conditioned real ale supplied by the Dow Bridge Brewery. The Brewery brews its own beer and also supplies beer from several other microbreweries. These beers are in great demand and the supply is augmented with Doombar. The address for Dow Bridge Brewery is Catthorpe but you could search the village in vain without seeing it. It is in fact situated in an old coach house behind a terraced cottage situated somewhere as you enter the village from the A5. You can look for it, but you won’t see it, there is no sign, not even a nameplate. However, a little further along the road you will come upon Malt Kiln Farm, not just a farm shop but a beer shop with an ample range of bottle conditioned ales from the Dow Bridge Brewery.
The name Dow Bridge comes from one of three bridges (Tripontium) where the A5 (Watling Street) crosses two streams and the river Avon. The Avon, in fact, rises nearby at Stamford.
The Roman connection has been used as a theme in the naming of the Dow Bridge beers. Names such as Legion, Centurion, Acris, Gladiator, Fosse and Praetorian Porter. They even make a bottled beer called Augustus.
There is plenty of time to have a drink and a chat at Hillmorton, the bar serving until 11:30pm. You won’t be thrown out until midnight and even then, very gently.
Peter Augustus
BRIDGEMATE SCORING
Several members have, from time to time, expressed astonishment at their positions at the end of a session. In some cases they thought that they were doing quite well but could not understand why, finally, their position was so low. Conversely others have thought that they were doing quite badly but could not understand why, finally, their position was so high. One reason for this apparent anomaly is that during early rounds the central computer has very little information and therefore allocates scores which do not mean very much and which, subsequently, are significantly modified. To explain this I have made up a worst case set of scores for an 11 Table Mitchell movement and have deliberately made NS to be declarer, made all scores different and put them in the order in which Board 1 (neither side vulnerable) is played. Also I have ensured, for the purposes of this example, that each NS IMP score is better than all previous NS IMP scores.
PAIRS CONTRACT IMPS FINALSCORE BRIDGEMATE
POINTS % %
NS EW NS EW NS EW NS EW
1 12 3NT*-1 -100 0 20 0 100 50 50
11 21 3NT-1 -50 2 18 10 90 100 0
10 19 3NT 400 4 16 20 80 100 0
9 17 4H 420 6 14 30 70 100 0
8 15 3NT+1 430 8 12 40 60 100 0
7 13 4H+1 450 10 10 50 50 100 0
6 22 3NT+2 460 12 8 60 40 100 0
5 20 3NT* 550 14 6 70 30 100 0
4 18 4H* 590 16 4 80 20 100 0
3 16 3NT*+1 610 18 2 90 10 100 0
2 14 4H*+1 650 20 0 100 0 100 0
The figures under the heading ‘Final Score Points’ show the final master points obtained by each pair and the next two columns shows them as percentages as far as Board 1 is concerned. The final two columns show the percentages which appear on the Bridgemate scoring device at the table.
At the end of Round 1 there are no other scores so the central computer allocates 50% to both pairs. At the end of Round 2 there are two scores so the central computer, which only knows that Pair 11 has a higher score than Pair 1, allocates scores as follows:-
PAIRS POINTS %SCORE
NS EW NS EW NS EW
1 12 0 1 0 100
11 21 1 0 100 0
But the Bridgemate scoring device only shows the % scores for pairs 11 and 21
At the end of Round 3 the central computer has that round’s information so it allocates scores as follows:-
PAIRS1 POINTS %SCORE
NS EW NS EW NS EW
1 12 0 2 0 100
11 21 1 1 50 50
10 19 2 1 100 0
But the Bridgemate scoring device only shows the % scores for pairs 10 and 19.
At the end of the session the central computer has complete information on all boards and allocates the final scores which, on each board, vary from 0% to 100%. However you can see that at the end of each round after Round 1 in this worst case made-up example the last NS pair to play has 100% and the last EW pair to play has 0%. At that stage the pairs previously playing the board are not aware that their scores have been changed and the pairs yet to play do not have any scores so only NS2 and EW14 have seen their final scores. However EW21 can be pleased that their score has apparently increased from 0% to 90% and NS10 saddened because their score has apparently decreased from 100% to 10%. Consequently at the end of Round 2 NS10 should remember the Bridge commandment ‘Thou shalt not gloat’ and EW21 could well remember ‘When you are at the bottom of the pile the only way you can move is upwards’. So it would be just as well if everyone ignored the % scores until the last few rounds. Another factor to remember is that, at the table, you can only see the scores of one board and all other scores taken collectively are much more important.
Malcolm Taylor
EDITOR’S COMMENT
I hope you have enjoyed reading this latest newsletter which is full of interesting and thought provoking suggestions and comments. You may remember that I have asked if anyone would be willing to join me as a sub-editor but no-one has offered to help. Surely there is someone out there, amongst our 152 members, who fancies the job? We are a non-profit making club and we rely on the dedication and hard work of our members to make it work. As Peter said we are hoping that many more of you become involved in running our club.
This newsletter consists of contributions from members, usually the same people, so if you have any comments, ideas etc PLEASE send them to me. It would be good to hear from more of you!!
Just one request, please send all contributions in Times New Roman 12 pt. I spend a devil of an amount of time changing fonts…….. at least I haven’t had one in Wingdings!
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My thanks to those of you who have contributed
Merry Christmas and a great bridge playing New Year to all.
Wendy Pattinson
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