Many of you may not be aware of how the EBU is funded.  For the past few years, rather than rely on subscription income they have been getting the bulk of their income from a scheme known as Universal Membership System (UMS).  Whenever players take part in a sesion at an affiliated club the club pays a small contribution to the EBU.  All members of that club automatically become members of the EBU. 

Since lockdown that income has dried up as no bridge clubs are operating face to face bridge.

We have been running free tournaments since March for Manchester players and the EBU has now prevailed upon us to pay UMS in respect of the sessions we run.  Accordingly we are now going to start charging for our sessions.   A proportion of the revenue collected will go to pay UMS and 30% of the total will go to BBO.  We are comfortable to pay BBO who have been providing their platform for us at no cost to run our duplicates.  The platform will still be free for those wanting to play social games.  Up to now our TDs have provided their services for nothing but now that we will be charging we will also use the revenue collected to pay them at the EBUs going rate.  This will mean that we can run more sessions and, in particular, will enable us to run evening events.  If we are not able to run some of our sessions using our own TDs then the EBU will find TDs for us.

Under the EBU scheme we are not able to charge any less than $3 so that will be our standard charge.  We will increase the number of boards in our standard duplicates to a minimum of 20 except for our non Expert events which will remain at 16 boards.

As time progresses we will review whether our sessions produce any surplus and, if so, the Executive of the MCBA will decide whether to donate it to charity or to feed it back into our member clubs.

Although we will not submit our sessions for NGS we will give masterpoints for all our paid sessions.

Our first paid event will be on Monday 1st June.  You will need to have BB$ in your Bridgebase account in order to play.  To see how to buy BB$ please CLICK HERE and watch the short video.

We will continue to run our monthly charity sessions on the last Wednesday of each month and these will not be submitted to the EBU for masterpoints in order that all the money we collect can be distributed to the charity.