July Newsletter + the Thoughts of Chairman Mark

You will have, by now, received an email with Kevin's July edition of the NSBC Newsletter.

If you missed it, you can find it (and all previous Newsletters) by clicking on Newsletters.

It's full of News, Results, Bridge Puzzles and what's coming up. Also don't miss our inspirational President's inspirational take on how the club is doing - reproduced below.

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In Starsky and Hutch they had Huggy Bear who gave them the “word on the street”. They seemed to rely totally on him and never talked to anyone else, so I guess his information could have been a bit skewed.

“What is going on Huggy?”

“The word on the street is that informant rates have gone through the roof. It’s $300 per tip now.”
Starsky whispers to Hutch “We only give him a fiver. I guess we’ll have to start paying up from now on.”

I’m lucky that I have a whole committee and a bunch of informants (well, staff is the proper term), so I get lots of good info. The word in the NSBC hood seems to currently be a bit wrong, so I’m going to talk about that.

Word on The Street 1:

We want to get everybody back face-to-face so we can shut down RealBridge.
No, we don’t. We have been promoting face-to-face sessions so that people know they are available and have a choice of venues and technologies. If we don’t get appropriate numbers for face-to-face we have to make difficult choices about closing down venues due to the relatively large, fixed costs.

Thankfully, we are (touch wood) doing very well in this area mainly thanks to Mike’s efforts, and numbers are up at East Lindfield and The Willis which is great.

The majority of our members use RealBridge, and we are very pleased to be able to continue to provide it. Gary does a fantastic job of running this for us and we have no intention at all of closing anything down.

Also, if you think about it, RealBridge is much less hassle for us than face-to-face (dealing cards, cleaning up, providing tea and coffee, printing hand records, etc), so why would we want to shut it down.

In case you’ve come here from the future to find the quote where I promised never to close a session on RealBridge, of course any individual session whether online or face-to-face, that isn’t popular for a period of time and has dwindling numbers will eventually be closed down so we can focus on the more popular sessions. That isn’t us shutting a session down, that is the session dying of natural causes and we always try to build sessions back up before this happens. Just saying.

Word on The Street 2:

Open Sessions are only for Open Players.
Nah, you can play up into any session you like. Everyone is welcome. The Supervised, Rookie and Restricted sessions are there to provide support for players as they develop, but there is nothing at all to stop you playing in a higher session than your masterpoints might suggest.

They even let me play in the Open!
The only thing that might happen is that if you play against better players, then at least to begin with, you are more likely to do worse than you would in a lower session. I find it quite inspiring that becoming a better player means you will get better results, but I’ve only ever won prizes that say, “Participation Award”, so what do I know.

If you fancy playing in a higher session, go for it. If you don’t like it, you can go back, nothing lost. If you aren’t sure about it, why not ask your director or teacher if they think it is a good idea or not. And if you are happy where you are, be happy where you are.

In next month’s newsletter… Word on the Street is that we are getting rid of Supervised, Rookie and Restricted and forcing everyone into the Open. No, we are not!

Congress

The highlight of the past month has to be the annual club congress. We are lucky to have a big enough club to be able to run a whole range of events over two extended weekends with events for all levels of experience for pairs and teams and to seamlessly combine online and face-to-face.
It felt, to me at least, that everything came together very well and highlighted how good it is to be able to offer different ways of playing bridge at our club. Congratulations to Mike and the team for making this happen.

The diversity of our congress even attracted some new members (with teaching, as always, moving our numbers up too). We are once again at just over 1,800 members. I even got an email from a BBO Robot asking if it could join so as to play in the Falls Estate Matchpoint Swiss Pairs. I checked the constitution and couldn’t see anything that mentioned our members needing to be human, so I took its money. Then when the game started, I booted it off and told it there was a connection error. Two can play at that game.

The Committee

As always, the committee has been active, and I haven’t. Ian “Lunch” McLaren is still working on his secret printers project. He seems to be deep under cover in the murky world of printer leasing and has taken to meeting people at the far end of carparks in unmarked cars.

Janie “Don’t Talk About Me in the Newsletter” Russ isn’t getting talked about this month.

Carol “Captain Marvel” McMurray has been spotted all over the place and was even in the kitchen at the congress serving up her home-made cakes.

Jake “Brains” Andrew and Shaz “The Lightning” Thompson have been deep into things too. Brains built a brilliant spreadsheet for Mike so we can properly track income and expenditure and apportion it to the right areas. Shaz went a step further and build a dashboard on top of it that not only shows us a breakdown of the financials, but also links into things like the social media activity and who is visiting the website. It’s like Star Trek, except its real and not made of cardboard boxes and glue. This is going to give us a really good way to take decisions based on accurate data, which I fear has removed yet another excuse for me when I get it wrong.

Both Jake and Shaz have also branched out into Hollywood with some great videos about what we are doing at the club. If you haven’t seen them then you should take a look. Short, professional, and informative. A bit like me.

Rod “Numbers” Owen had the cheek to go on holiday, but we still sent him the same amount of work to do. He has been working with Kit on breaking down the costs too. So, we are really doing this work from two side. In the trading world we would think of this as a front-office view (Jake and Shaz) vs a back-office view (Rod and Kit). Or top-down vs bottom-up. It will take time to get it right and to get the numbers to roughly match, but it will be a really useful tool for us in a couple of months.

Julie says I can’t have any more biscuits because I look like I’m ready to hibernate so I’m going to change my sign off (at least for this month).

Friendly - Inclusive - Inspirational

Mark