Our own Ayako! On Thursday Richard Soloman from NZ Bridge presented Ayako with an award for being the NZ bridge volunteer of the month for October. No one deserved it more. The club also presented her with a small gift to recognise all the work she does for our club!

Am unsure whether there was any relationship between the amount of Babich wine consumed and the overall result last Friday!

Every so often, but more particularly at this time of year, we have a look at who is king of the castle in each of our four main sessions. At present, with just five sessions to go, Inge is leading on Monday mornings, Kevin on Monday nights and Thursday afternoons, and Clare (who will probably disqualify herself anyway) leads Liz on Wednesday nights. The full report is available under the Results tab.

Michael gets interviewed by Barry and Mereana on The Bridge Zone Show. Click to have a listen as he holds forth on the topic of X-Clubs.

Nice to see some Cambridge members play at congress but I hope to see more next year!

Marvellous to see our Herman win the EW Swiss pairs at congress.  The field was HUGE! And he was competing against the best of the best! Well done to him and his partner William Liu.

Well done to Mike and Ella who scored two excellent sessions of 60% placing them in third by an extremely narrow margin and just missing first place.  The competition is incredibly difficult at this Open level so good on them!

Congratulations to Kay and her Wellingtonian partner, Dougal, who finished second in the Intermediate teams at Congress.  Kay was the first to reply to my SOS looking for a partner for Dougal to play the intermediate events with. Kay and Dougal had a practice in Cambridge on Wednesday and obviously ironed out any misunderstandings there! 

Last year, Anna and I played the NZ Open Restricted pairs together and finished 2nd. Photo was taken by Di and Jane on the way out of the venue. It was in the car on the way home that Anna casually checked the results that she had been entering playing South.  Oh dear! A scoring correction was needed and it wasn’t a good one. So we rang the venue and alerted the scorer to it and the change meant we came third. C’est La vie.

We are about to embark on a brand new across-the-board handicapping system. Up until now our scoring system has looked back at everyone's history of results to calculate a sort of average when asked to update the handicaps for a particular day. No more! We are moving to a dynamic handicapping system that can be applied to anyone in any session. It is based on your XG rating ... which gets updated every week.