Well done to the Bolton team which won the LCBA Team of 8 and qualify for the Regional Final of the Garden Cities. The team was J Smith/M Farr, P Evans/A Whittam, M Nicholson/J Morrell, S Norris/R Greenhalgh. Full results at Teams of 8

The annual Austin Barnes Tropy 2024 based on the best of 8 out of 11 scores is now complete. Congratulations to the winner Stuart Norris, second Rod Greenhalgh. In the handicapped table, congratulations to Helene Collins, second Dave Thomson and Ken Wood.

An online match between Bolton and Tyler Hills (Canterbury) was played tonight online. There were 8 Head to Head matches of 16 boards with half time change of opponents. Bolton won the match by 89 Vps to 71 VPs.  Best performances from our B team (M Farr,MNicholson, J Morrell, A Whittam) who won their match 20-0 and our F team (L Hitchen, D Fairweather, C Prescott, C Ashworth) who won 19-1. Full results will be on Tyler Hills Bridgewebs site in due course.

We will be holding a Swiss Pairs competition instead of the usual Pairs on Monday 20th May 2024. We will play 5 x 5 board matches.

In a Swiss Pairs tournament, your opponents for the second and all subsequent matches are determined by how well you are doing overall at the end of each match. The system will find you a pair to play against with a similar or identical rolling score. Thus, as the tournament progresses the players doing well only play against other players that are doing well and similarly for those doing less well. This also means that sometimes you will sit NS and at others EW and this produces an overall winner rather than winners in each direction. The number of boards per match will be of 5 boards duration. Match scores are converted to Victory Points (VPs) on a scale of 0 – 20. It is the rolling total VP score that is used to ‘match up’ opponents from round two onwards. Swiss Pairs are controlled and scored using a program that prevents pairs from playing each other twice.

Oliver Cowan has very kindly offered to buy any bbo dollars that our members are holding that they won't use. Linda Hitchen will coordinate this operation. For all who would like a refund,  pleases supply Linda with your details  and in due course, Oliver will refund you in sterling at the prevailing exchange rate via BACS . Linda's Email is hitcheni@btinternet.com and Tel no is 01204 494506.

The details needed are:

The relaxed Bridge and Strawberry Cream Tea event will be held next Tuesday 30th July in the afternoon session. 

See the attached Poster.   Thank you to everyone who has said they will be attending.  Catering arrangements have been made for this number.  Enjoy the event.

Next week Sep 9th - 15th 2024 is the EBU Festival of Bridge week. The EBU will donate our UMS to Cancer Research UK in all events. There will be some buckets at the club for players to make any further donations.