Monday 14th March should have been an EBU Simultaneous Pairs event but unfortunately due to a technical error the wrong boards were duplicated so all players who participated that evening will be receiving a £2.50 refund.

 Tribute to Gerald Nodding R.I.P. in one of his last sessions at the Club in winning the Hallam Cup with Maureen Parker in better days last February.

BRIDGE LESSONS

for beginners

AT SUTTON COLDFIELD BRIDGE CLUB

160 Walmley Road (Rugby Club grounds)

www.suttoncoldfieldbridgeclub.co.uk

TWELVE WEEK COURSE

STARTING DATE 3rd SEPTEMBER

^{Tuesday Evenings 7-10 p.m.}

^{Enquiries to Bob on 0121-354-6754}

^{or Marilyn on 0121-308-3484}

 Link to EBU Master Point Reports to end of 2012 CLICK HERE

Please be aware that SCBC will allow conventional understandings for normal club sessions up to and including Level 3 as defined by the criteria in the latest EBU Orange Book.

Players who want to play Level 4 conventions need to seek dispensation from the Duplicate Sub-Committee who will normally ask that completed convention cards are used and appropriate alerting and explanation is made.

For more Orange Book information please click here.

In line with the EBU Orange Book, Strong 2 Level opening bids need to comply with the  ‘ExtendedRule of 25’ which means the minimum allowed is any of:

a) a hand that contains as a minimum the normal high card point strength associated with a one-level opening and at least eight clear cut tricks, or

b) any hand meeting the Rule of 25 (HCP plus length of 2 longest suits) or

c) any hand of at least 16 HCPs

Examples: A K Q J x x x x © x x ¨ x x § x does count as 8 clear-cut tricks.

A K Q x x x x x © x x ¨ x x § x does not.

Clear-cut tricks are clarified as tricks expected to make opposite a void in partner’s hand and the second best suit break.

Deviation from this however minor will on a TD call result in the hand being recorded. Pairs who build up a record of such deviations will be deemed to have an illegal systemic agreement and be asked by the committee to discontinue the practice.

The TD at the time will follow EBU guidelines  to categorise whether the deviation constitutes the equivalent of a green, amber or red psyche. The latter of which will result in a score adjustment to 60%-40% in favour of the non-offending side.

John Holland has kindly donated a Cup to be played for by our non-expert players. 

The committee and John have agreed that this should be to encourage players of County Master standard or less, i.e. with less than 5,000 EBU Master Points in the EBU Ranking List at the end of 2011. (previous non-EBU Member players of long-standing who the committee feel are above this standard will be ineligible).

All you have to do is accumulate as many Master Points as you can by playing in ANY Club afternoon or evening event from Monday to Friday from January to June 2012 inclusive and you can play with any partner(s).

There will be a prize for the top three in the ranking list as well as any session prize money that you may win.

Note - This supersedes our previous new competition announcement.

Click here to see how you are doing so far

The Committee have been asked to clarify the rules for alerting of doubles.

If a suit is bid naturally or is a short 1C or 1D, then an unalerted double is for take-out up to 3NT.

Doubles over 3NT must NOT be alerted.

Doubles of no-trump bids, if not alerted, must be for penalties.

Doubles of artificial suit bids, if not alerted, must be for penalties, i.e. they will show a holding in the suit doubled.

Redoubles are to play if not alerted.

Failure to alert or not alert correctly may result in a TD call and an adjusted score if damage has been deemed to have occured.

Our appeal to Bridge Players to PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE park between the white lines in the Club car park (even if it takes a couple of minutes more to get it right, so that more cars can be accommodated) has been largely taken on board, so please keep up the good work.

Please remember that the disabled spaces are for blue badge holders only and parking in the turning area at the end of the car park and in the hatched area in front of the downstairs bar is not permitted.

For just over two years we have been using the Deep Finesse algorithm within the Dealmaster Pro software program to bring you hand records showing makeable contracts.

Deep Finesse is quite slow in that it takes about 5-6 hours of elapsed computer time to prepare a month of hand records.

There is now a new kid on the block written by  international Swedish bridge player Bo Hagland that will do the double dummy analysis (DDA) for a month in about an hour.

From December 1st we will still be using Dealmaster Pro to generate the exciting hands we have all come to love and hate but will use Bo Haglund's program to do the DDA.

We will also use the BridgeComposer software from Ray Spalding which incorporates Bo Haglund's DDA to format and print the hand records and display them on the website as a full PDF hand record sheet as given out on the evening and now additionally the DDA will be included within the results section.

You may have noticed this last change already, but a word of warning Bo Haglund's DDA computes ALL possible makeable contracts even on 2-2 fits whereas Deep Finesse did not do this.

A sample of the Bridge Composer output for Friday 3rd December can be seen by clicking here.

18 BridgePads (electronic table top wireless computer scoring gadgets) plus associated server and software have been purchased by the Club and will be used for most sessions from now on.

PLEASE CLICK TO READ THE USER INSTRUCTIONS

PDF Hand Records for the current month are available as a single PDF file by event via the left hand menu.

For previous months, composite PDF files containing all events held within a month for a particular year are available via the left hand menu.

This is NOT an April Fool joke but the EBU's Pay to Play (P2P) regime starts at the club on Thursday 1st April 2010.

As agreed at the last AGM the club will fund the additional costs out of the normal table money. This will be reviewed towards the end of the year by members when the 2011 P2P figure becomes available.

From April 1st 2010 onwards paper Master Points will cease to be issued, instead points will be direct credited to your personal EBU account which you can log onto using your EBU number. A list of EBU numbers will be available in the club shortly.

Anyone not having a computer at home can ask a committee member for access via the club computer to check and/or print-out their Master Point record or view/amend their details held by the EBU.

From January 1st 2010 there will be some additions and changes to PDF Hand Record Names Titles  and Website Event Names.

The following table shows the new scheme:

In total there are 53,644,737,765,488,792,839,237,440,000 different bridge deals that are equally possible.

The software we have purchased is cabable of generating any sequence of these deals within a particular bridge session.

To ensure randomness we will be conducting tests on a regular basis to ensure that expected high card point averages and hand distributions are maintained.

Please click here if you would like to see the result of the third analysis which covers 2788 boards over 85 sessions during the period from 14th November 2008 to 31st March 2009

It shows there is little variance to expected values even given the smallness of the sample in relation to total possible deals.

So our computer deals are fair in terms of closeness to expected values. Players may find them different to previous hand shuffling of deals that tends to make flatter hands and even splits more likely than the true norm. 

The new dealing machine was delivered on 13th November. and is now operational with first use made for the Duval Cup on Friday 14th November 2008.

The Club have purchased 9 sets of 33 Duplimate style boards to allow for cyclical rotation and advance hand setup. 

DealmasterPro software has been purchased that utilises the BigDeal algorithm to give truly random hands, these can be analysed using inbuilt Deep Finesse code to give players optimum contracts on hand record printouts. Look for the box in the bottom right hand corner for each hand.

A Hewlett Packard multi-function B&W laser printer has been purchased so that these hand record printouts can be produced the end of an evening session.

Hand details are also being posted to the website as PDF files accessed from the left hand menu and also to appear with the travellers (both these can be printed by players directly from the website) 

Click here to read a copy of the EBU Strategy document in PDF format.

Concerns had been expressed to the Committee that players were overhearing comments made at adjacent tables for boards that were about to be played.

The German system of numbering tables was therefore trialled on an experimental basis on Wednesday 27th August and Friday 12th September.

Please click for analysis of feedback forms from the trial.

The new Laws of Duplicate Bridge 2007 came into force on August 1st 2008 click here to read about the main changes on the EBU Web site.

The TD Team and Committee with Allan Bond in an advisory capacity have undergone a trial period of the BridgeWebs software to ascertain if it meets the Club's long term needs.

One main advantage over the current modus operandii is that scorers can upload directly from the Scorebridge software saving Allan time in having to read our emails and then formatting and placing web pages for our existing website. In theory therefore scores will be posted a little quicker.

Views from a number of our members regarding the look and feel of BridgeWebs have contributed to the committee's decision on 22/01/2008 to adopt BridgeWebs as our preferred Website framework and we are currently finalising arrangements with the providers.

The existing website will shortly cease to be updated and URL links to it will be forwarded to this new site.

The committee would welcome any views on what extra features you would like to see on the new website. Please make your views known to either Nigel Argust or Nick Woosnam in the first instance.