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.

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.