Clare’s night out in Felsted
Playing at another club, it was a reminder on a number of fronts as to how lucky we are in Cambridge with our bridge club.
The club I chose to play at may not be typical. It is in a British Legion hall and the tables had to be set up and taken down for the evening’s play. The club plays once a week on a Tuesday evening. As space is limited to 12 tables, the membership is limited to 60. I made the mistake of describing it as elite but they preferred to refer to it as a relatively “social” club. The intensity of play combined with the noise level compared with our Monday night session. Interestingly at least half the players always play with the same partner and most rarely change partners. There are no series and there is an occasional event. The club does not host tournaments. Whilst the English Bridge Union has a handicapping system, none is applied at club level (within this club). The 1NT opening bid is announced but not the 1C opener.
On arrival we were introduced to the director. Mum’s friends who took us very kindly insisted on paying our table money. Despite this occurring just after arriving, we were still asked to pay twice by different people. It made me realise how important our offer of a free first session when arriving at the club is, not least to ensure you are not accosted to cough up!!
There were bidding boxes to negotiate. We sat down and began the evening by dealing the boards and inserting a “curtain card” into the top of each deal. After playing the board for the first time, you write down the hand on the back of the curtain card and most seem to check their hand matched this at the start of each subsequent hand. One player seemed to check my curtain card before I arrived at the table! I desisted from asking him whether my cards were worth looking at or not!
By this time, I had found the bar on site and had bought my partner and me a glass of wine each. That soon helped dull any pain from the bad results that seem to be a constant barrage!
There was no dealing machine and the hands were reasonably distributional except that the cards Far favoured NS players. Sadly we were sitting EW and we did not fare well! We led the wrong thing, had the opposition do exactly the right thing and the few boards we did play (7/24), we stuffed up! There was a mobile phone to score on that linked to the laptop and will be uploaded apparently to the EBU site but I have not yet located the results. Not having timely information in a hand record, bridge mate or website meant that players poured over the result at the end of each hand. It seemed that many got away with making contracts that should not have been there to make but harder to tell without the computer spelling it out for you as to what the makeable contracts are!
Most were very friendly introducing themselves but I did smile to myself when I sat down at one table and a gruff voice said loudly to me, “You are Pair 10, aren’t you?’
The quote of the night however goes to the director, who after welcoming the visitors and encouraging the room to call the Director if there were any issues, proudly followed this up with, ‘I like to shout a lot”. This confirmed what our friends told us to expect. Hardly surprising therefore that I did not see the Director being called at all! Importantly, we had a fun night out with nobody mistaking Mum and me as sisters :)