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.

well done to Beth and Irenee who scored a brilliant 62.35% in the afternoon session and thereby won a session prize

It's a clean sweep to Tauranga who narrowly pipped Cambridge again by 53.02% to 51.93% in the average of handicapped X-Clubs scores. Cambridge takes the prize for Best Consistency. Here is the link to Karen's article on the Tauranga site. Well done everyone. We hope you all enjoyed yourselves.

With HelloClub having been generally accepted and well bedded in we are about to turn on a new feature: automated email advice that your account contains funds enough for only two more games. Starting from September members will receive these notices when their account balance falls below $8 after playing their latest session.

Cambridge players enjoyed themselves at Te Awamutu Intermediate tournament today. Two pairs came home with prizes for playing well and coming second in one of the two sessions.

The morning belonged to Jenny and Vicki and the afternoon to Marlene and Terry.

Wednesday players at both Cambridge and Tauranga played the same hands on the 14th of August - as they will on the 21st and 28th. This is not abnormal - it happens with every session of bridge at about one third of clubs in NZ. It is part of a scheme called X-Clubs which scores across the results of many clubs. The reason for this arrangement is to slot everyone's results into a wider spectrum so the percentages are more meaningful. It takes about 120 pairs for the results to settle down to +/-0.5% of what they would be in a huge field.

To establish the degree of difficulty of each question at the recent Cambridge Sixes, analysis of answers submitted was carried out. Not every team of the 42 chose to send in their answers to every round. An average of 35 sheets were analysed over the four rounds. The correct answers are given below in case you wish to try the quiz yourself. Some amusing responses (in brackets after the question) were observed.

A huge thank you to Bruce Hancock for taking and publishing all the photos and Dawn who made sure nobody was left out.....

Link to Team Photos named and in team number order 

Link to Prizegiving photos in order of presentation

Tauranga and Cambridge will be rowing/sailing to the start line this Wednesday 14 August at 7pm.

As in the America's Cup, the rules of engagement have changed this year.