EBU National Handicap Pairs 

08 September 2024 

A great opportunity to take part in a national EBU event from the comfort of your own home wherever that home may be

The National Handicap Pairs will be played in all participating clubs across the country some face to face and some on-line and all on the same day.  Each club's results will be returned to EBU and then ranked after handicapping with reference to a partnership's NGS grade.  The handicapping means that the winners will be those who 'outplay' their partnership NGS grade to the greatest extent.  We already score all our results on a handicapped basis for our handicapped competitions so you will be familiar with how it works.  So there is an opportunity for everyone to play on a level playing field alongside everyone else taking part across the country.

There is more information about this event and how it works on the EBU website here.

Our event will be on-line using the Realbridge platform and will start at 2.00pm with approximately 30 boards to play.  There will be a mid session break of 10 to 15 minutes so we should finish at around 6.00pm.  Table money for taking part in the event will be £6 of which £3 goes to EBU and 40p to Realbridge for hosting our virtual session.   EBU will donate £1 per player to Cancer Research as part of Bridge -It's a Big Deal, festival week.

Pre-registration is required here so we know who to expect and what we need to do to set everything up.  Registration closes at 12:00pm on 7th September 2024.  You must have an EBU number and public NGS grade to play in this event - unless you want to play for fun without appearing in the results ranking.

We will post a link on our website registration page on the day to log into the event and ask players to log in by 1:45pm at the latest on 8th September 2024 so we have some time to iron out any problems and get started on schedule.

We run regular Realbridge sessions on Thursday afternoons and are pleased to add the EBU National Handicap Pairs event to our Realbridge calendar.  If you are interested in taking part but have not yet tried Realbridge, we run a session every Thursday afternoon at 4.00pm so please give it a try and see if you like it.  If you would like to know more please do not hesitate to contact us - click here, fill in our contact form with your details and your query and we will do our best to deal with any queries you may have.

For those of you unfamiliar with Realbridge it provides a virtual table at which all 4 players sit with a video and audio connection over the internet.  That means you can see and speak to your partner and your opponents just as though you were sitting around a table playing face to face.  Bids are alerted or announced in the same way as face to face bridge.  It is possible to have a secret self alerting procedure where typed self alerts appear on screen for opponents but not for partner who will be in blissful ignorance of what you have said to your opponents.   All you need to take part in a Realbridge session is an internet connection and a computer, notebook or tablet equipped with a camera, microphone and speakers.  You can take part using a smartphone but the small screen size makes it less than ideal, even if manageable.  It also possible to play without an audio/video connection in which case you will see the table bids made and cards played and communicate with others by typing messages in a chat bar - like Messenger or BBO.  For more info on Realbridge click here.  We think it is probably the best on-line platform for replicating face to face bridge in the comfort of your own home.