Mark has Nothing to Report
This month I have absolutely nothing for you. I have almost made it through a year of rambling on (pretty much about nothing), but this month I’m empty.
Oh, hang on. While I was busy at the Gold Coast Congress narrowly avoiding finishing last in everything I entered, NSBC members had enormous success doing the exact opposite and actually winning events.
We had club members winning everything from lucky door prizes to the prestigious Open Teams Championships, which is now part of the World Bridge Federation’s World Bridge Tour, so you’ve got to be pretty good to win that one. I would list your names here, but I’d almost certainly spell someone’s name wrong and miss someone out, so better I leave that to Kevin who also has pictures so you can recognise people. Well done to everyone!
Let me think… what else is happening. Well, we’ve hit record table numbers at The Willis, which is very good to see, and all of our sessions are going well. The AGM is coming up on 29th April, so put that in your calendar, presumably with a title like “Hairdressers” or “All day BBQ” so when you get asked if you are coming to the AGM, you already have your excuse ready. For a club with over 1,700 members, we do struggle to get anyone to come to the AGM. I am going to take that as a positive, as if you really hated what the club was doing and in particular the President and Committee, then I expect we would get a huge turnout of pitchfork waving villagers. Let’s see what happens this year.
The ABF has set up a committee to look into Online Bridge, hopefully a lot of you got the chance to provide your input through the survey, if not you can let me know what you think. I’m not involved in it in anyway, I just like listening to other people’s opinions in case they have better ideas than me. Actually, that is not true. I don’t really listen at all. I am on the Online Bridge Committee, so hopefully our views will be represented. Interestingly, I don’t really know what our views are. I think they are as diverse as the feedback we have through the survey. Some of us love playing face-to-face, some love playing online, and some of us just love playing whatever way we can. It will be challenging to work out what actions the ABF need to take, but at the moment we are all about gathering feedback.
One last thought, at the Gold Coast I bid 7NT on one hand, which doesn’t come up very often. The question is… What is worse than bidding and making 7NT when most of the field stopped in 6NT?
Answer: Looking at the results for the whole field and noticing that not one of the top 10 pairs in the event bid it. Are they not good enough to find it? Or more likely, was it a terrible grand slam to be in and your best board of the day was actually proof that you are a hopeless bridge player, with a lot still to learn!
Mark Guthrie
P.S. Check out the March Newsletter here
