Our ♣ sparkles like a ♦, has a big ♥ and ♠♠♠ of bonhomie, boosted by beverage, biscuits, and banter before bridge begins.

Sessions held every Thursday at 7.00pm at the Coombes Community Centre, Burns Road, Royston.

The club has electronic scoring and computer-dealt hands so results and deals are available straight away.

Visitors are always welcome but need to come with a partner. If you are new to the area, use Find a Partner (Public) and the club will make every effort to provide a suitable partner for you.

◄ For further details, see Information and Calendar.

◄ Do you want to learn to play bridge, or improve your play? See Learning Bridge.

◄ We also feature a few interesting hands played at the club recently, see Hand of the Month.

We now have 14 pairs signed up for the Mavis Drake Teams Challenge on Thursday 9th July.  This event is now closed.  No more entries can be accepted. 

As this Teams event is intended to give every club pair a reasonable chance of winning a club trophy, one minor enhancement to be made this year is that the pairs will be informally “seeded” for the random draw for teams, to ensure that the club’s strongest pairs aren't drawn together to make a team.

Photo finish?

Thursday’s Royston Bridge Club Pairs produced a tight contest, with Alan and Saroj taking first place on 57.92%, just ahead of Andrew and Dave on 57.08%. Three pairs shared third: Steve and Keith, Paul and Miriam, and Pat and Nicholas, all on 51.67%. In other words, one board here or there, one extra undertrick, one less optimistic bid, and the leaderboard might have looked quite different.

The featured deal was Board 18, where Alan and Saroj found the only successful slam of the evening.

              North
              ♠️ J93
              ♥️ 973
              ♦️ T42
              ♣️ T653
West                          East
♠️ K762                       ♠️ AQ5
♥️ AKQ52                      ♥️ 84
♦️ 87                         ♦️ AKQ65
♣️ 84                         ♣️ KQ2
              South
              ♠️ T84
              ♥️ JT6
              ♦️ J93
              ♣️ AJ97

Several pairs played 3 NT by East, making anything from 10 to 13 tricks. One pair stopped in 4 NT, making 12. But only Alan and Saroj reached 6 NT by East, making exactly 12 tricks for +990 and a deserved top.

The lesson is an old one: when you have 32 high-card points, solid diamonds, strong hearts and all the aces except one, it is usually time to grab the bull by the horns and start bidding. East has the powerhouse: ♠️AQ, ♦️AKQ and ♣️KQ. West contributes ♠️K and ♥️AKQ. An embarrassment of honours.

The ♣️A was the one cloud in the sky, but not enough to rain on your parade.

Elsewhere, Board 7 showed the other side of slam bidding. Two pairs reached 6 NT by South and both went three off. One table played 4 NT, made 12 tricks, and scored better than the unsuccessful slams. In Bridge, fortune does not always favour the brave.

There was also plenty of red-card activity. Board 2 saw 5 ♣️ doubled by North make 12 tricks twice for +950, proving that doubling is a useful convention when used by the opponents. Board 5 produced the evening’s largest penalty: 5 ♣️ doubled by West, six tricks only, for +1100 to North-South..

Congratulations Alan and Saroj!

This is Royston Bridge Club's official website, Will Huggins is the current web administrator.

Please have a browse through the website. Some pages are only available to Members. To access these pages click on the link to Members Only on the top right of the Home page to login.

Any comments or suggestions for improving the website are welcome. Members can email me direct, and non-members via Contact Us under the Information tab.