Hi all,

Firstly I wanted to say I hope everyone enjoyed the tournament. I am so glad that so many beginners stepped out of their comfort zones to take part. Congratulations to Ervin Wee and Liangxun Tan for a dominant victory in the competition. Also I would like to congratulate Zhaowei, Killai and Jessica for performing the best of all the beginner players. The full set of results are attached.

As you may know, the tournament overran so we did not have time to do the post mortem. Therefore, this will happen at the start of the session on Tuesday in Blackett 741 at 7pm. This will provide a great opportunity to learn and improve. I will also reveal my scores on these boards as they were played in competition at Young Chelsea Bridge Club on 24th October.

I am excited to announce that we have decided on our competition team for this year. It was decided based on the results of the competition. Well done to everyone who made it.

A team: Ben Lewis, Lee Ann Madissoon, Ervin Wee, Liangxun Tan

B team: Ryan Song, Tianxiang Fu, Yuan Wang, Yang Hu, Zitai Wang, Hoi Leong Pan

Hope to see some of you there!

On the week commencing 21st November, training sessions will start. We plan to use the Tuesday sessions as a casual session whilst the Thursday sessions would be focused on improving bidding and card play. We intend to alternate between beginner/intermediate sessions and squad sessions. We will run it is in this way if we have sufficient demand. They will provisionally be held in Blackett 741 at 6pm. 

For those looking for more opportunities to play bridge, there is a local bridge club called the Young Chelsea Bridge Club which has sessions on Mondays and Fridays. 

Here is a link to their page if you are interested https://www.bridgewebs.com/youngchelsea/

I would also recommend installing BBO which is a free online bridge software. When you make an account, write your username in the discord chat so we can add you. There is also great declarer practice hands in the Bridge Master section, which will help people of all levels to improve their card play.

My plea to get more members for bridge club resulted in one new member last week. Let’s hope this one is more successful. Like I said last week, your support is vital for us to get the recognition and financial support our society needs to fulfil all our plans for this year. As you can see, we put a lot of effort into running this society. For example I spent over three hours writing excel code to score the competition because we do not have bridge mates which are too expensive, and Lee spent two hours organising the cards and sorting them.

It would be great to hear from you. Are you enjoying bridge club and is there anything you want us to do differently? Are you interested in the Thursday sessions? If you are interested, but are not free on Thursday, let me know. It is possible for it to be moved. Do you like one long email a week or would you rather all these points be in separate emails spread out across the week?

Please reply to this email or email me at bl621@ic.ac.uk

Many thanks, 

Ben Lewis

Bridge Vice President