Matamata, Te Aroha, Morrinsville Clubs

We had a quality field turn up in Matamata on Sunday from as far North as Auckland and South to New Plymouth.

Winners with a great afternoon session and a pretty decent morning one as well were Waikato pair John Little and Graham Saunders

Intermediate winners

Second place went to Rochelle van Heuven and Tim Rigter of Te Aroha.

Intermediate runners up

Intermediate: The top pairs from the Morning session square off against each other at the start of session 2. Te Aroha's Rochelle van Heuven and Tim Rigter vs Cambridge's Vicky Jacobsen and Jenny Oxley.

The hand of the day came courtesy of Board 11 in session 2...

Dealer south none vulnerable.

	AJ Q763 Q2 KQJ65
K643 AKJT9742 A		Q9875 85 764 964
	T2 AKJT942 8743

With shape and favourable vulnerability for both sides, many in the field were pushed into slam. While 6 by South shouldn't make according to the makeables - this would only have been with a spade lead - but this would have been an unusual lead from West who was sitting there with a shed load of diamonds and singleton A of Clubs.

Most south's would open a preemptive 3 or even 4. We suspect that nobody looked for the E-W spade fit with West eventually overcalling 5. North with 15 points and looking an 11 card fit in hearts easily calls 5. West, understandably has fallen in love with their hand and calls onto slam much to the dismay of East with their 2 mere points. The lucky ones get doubled by North and make their contract. The unlucky ones get outgunned by North bidding 6 and the really unlucky ones then go and double North-South who then make their slam!

What's been happening in the Matamata club lately ... benefit night, competition winners, new members and a new Grand Master. Read all about it in the document attached.

Congratulations to Lynette Morgan who today after coming runner-up in the Waikato Area Pairs series gained the requisite couple of A points she needed to gain her Grandmaster status.

lynette and lesley: Lynette GM receives her bouquet and congratulations from Lesley Quilty GM at Monday Night bridge in Matamata

Becoming a Grandmaster is not an easy or common occurrence. Only around 140 people in the country hold the GM rank in NZ. You need at least 1000 rating points (and at least 500 A points).

Well done Lynette - awesome job:)

See below photos of local Morrinsville, Te Aroha and Matamata members enjoying the Cambridge 6s tournament in the weekend. At 66 tables (or 44 teams) it is the largest one day bridge tournament.

Cardiac Arrest: Pamela Clydesdale, John Phillips, Ian Bond and Lynette Morgan combined with a couple of northland relatives to come 5th overall out of 44 teams.

Family Time: Anna, Foster, Jacob and Mum Kalma along with Charlotte Jager and Adrian Wisse from Te Aroha. The best of this bunch was Jacob and Adrian who came 3rd in the Intermediate section.

Dirty half dozen: Michelle, Jan, Noel, Kathy Marie & Beth represented Matamata as the dirty 1/2 dozen

Bridge Mates: The Morrinsville team.

Peter and Malcolm: Peter and Malcolm deep in thought - they were in the Dagg team

A disappointing entry of just 4 teams played at Morrinsville on Sunday Aug 6.

And that included a team of four novices, all from different clubs, assembled just the evening before.

Not surprisingly that team did not fare well in the final reckoning especially as neither pair had played with each other before. We hope they enjoyed the day though, and perhaps learned something.
The teams played a 16-board match against each of the other three teams. Each match was split into two halves so each pair played against both pairs of the opposing team.

The winners were the Te Aroha team of Malcolm Kirkby, Peter Daffurn, Charlotte Jager and John Phillips. They won all their matches convincingly (although they didn’t quite score the maximum 20 VPs in any of them)

Second were the Hamilton team of Bryan Robb, Linley Robb, Jim Ward and Bill West with two wins (one of those WAS by 20 VPs).
Third were Jo Bowman & Jenny Shaw (Morrinsville) with Nicola Slade & Peter Tait-Jamieson (Te Aroha). They won one match with 20 VPs but lost the other two.

And the “encouragement award” goes to Lynne Boyack (Huntly), Mary Allen (Morrinsville), Lynn Ryan (Matamata) and Tineke Yates (Te Aroha).

Great to see a full room for the annual Matamata 5A open. Winners were team Franklin/Auckland.

Matamata Open winners: From L-R; Grant Jarvis, Richard Solomon, Gary Chen & Ian Berrington

Yes it was a dead heat thanks to a late scoring adjustment!

For those who want to work out who was playing with whom ... check out the results!

Third place: Carol Richardson and Steve Boughey combine for third place

Best Matamata Pair (and 5th overall): Kathy and Ken Yule, best Matamata pair and winners of the Kim Crawford wines

Other winners were Kate Terry and Judy Pawson who took fourth place.

The World Contract Bridge rule book gets updated every 10 years.   The 2017 edition has just been rolled out and will be in force in NZ from 1st August. Murray Wiggins, NZ Bridge Chief Director held a seminar for directors in Matamata last week to explain some of the changes

There have been a lot of minor changes to the rules which you probably don't need to be aware of (and many the rules have changed to reflect what people are doing already like it is now officially against the rules to move the board from the centre of the table during play).  

However, probably the biggest change is the introduction of a "comparable call" which is further explained in the attached flyer that Kathy Yule put together for us laypeople.

The key changes that you may experience at the bridge table and how the comparable bid can effect the play are as follows;

Pass or Bid out of turn

Previously:   If you passed/bid out of turn and the LHO didn't accept it, the penalty was that your bid was cancelled and you were ruled out of the bidding for one round.   This often caused partner to bid wildly guessing the final contract because their partner not being allowed another bid in the auction.

Now:   The bid is cancelled and you can continue to take part in the bidding contest as long as your next bid is comparable to your first bid (or is limited to your original mistaken pass/bid).  See notes for further explanation of comparable bids.

Insufficient Bid

This has also been rewritten to take into the new comparable rule ... so;

previously:   If you made an insufficient bid and were told to 'make it good' but this would change the meaning of the bid BUT a change of bid would mean that your partner could not bid again for the rest of the auction.

now:  If you make an insufficient bid using a convention then you can 'make it good' with a different bid as long as it had a comparable meaning to your first illegal bid.  

If you as the opposition feel aggrieved that your opponents have used unauthorised information through making a mistaken or insufficient bid to their advantage or they think the comparable bid is not really comparable - you can voice your case to the director and they will look at the hand on a case-by-case basis and see if any adjustment is required.

Thirty teams turned up to compete in the dual competition of a 5A open teams run alongside a 8B multigrade (where the team had a maximum of 200 A points).

Spa town winners

Congratulations to our Auckland friends; Andi Boughey, Carol Richardson, Michael Ware and Matthew Brown who rose to the top after 6 rounds undefeated.

Spa town Runners up

Second place were perennial podium getters - Patrick Carter, Barry Jones, Jenny Millington & Julie Atkinson from Hamilton and Auckland.

Spa Town Multigrade winners

Top team in the multigrade hailed from Mt Albert ... Don Gao Bi, Xiao Liu, William Wang & Phillip Zheng.

We are still working on the butler datums ... hopefully that will follow soon - although all other results are available.

Thanks everybody for supporting the event - we had a great new venue and our Te Aroha members did us proud with the catering (thanks also to Pub Charity for funding the venue and catering).

Look forward to seeing you all next year:)

Results are in ....

overall team results collated over the three sections are:

Waikato Inter-Club Teams

Collated Results by Club
VPs
1 Waikato 323.32
2 Hamilton 285.38
3 Matamata 264.16
4 Putaruru/Tokoroa 256.98
5 Cambridge 237.51
6 Thames 221.31
7 Morrinsville 211.69
8 Te Aroha 190.63
9 Huntly 170.00

The full results are up on the Hamilton website...

Well done to Matamata Open who topped their field and will be heading to the Waikato Bays play off and the Matamata junior team who came second in their division and will also be representing Waikato at the Waikato Bays final.

The annual NZ Bridge Congress is on our doorstep in Hamilton and is held from Saturday 30th September to Saturday 7th October.

There are a number of events you can take part in - from Novice through to Open across the week. And to encourage people who aren't regular congress goers, the Waikato Bays regional committee are sponsoring up to 4 people to congress to the value of $200 each. You can either self nominate to go into the draw ... or your club can nominate worthy recipients.

Conditions apply:
You need to be a member of a Waikato-Bays club that is affiliated to NZ Bridge.
Self-nomination:
You must have played in at least 2 tournaments in the Region since 1st September of the previous year.
You have not played more than once at Congress in the last 5 years (excluding the Top Teams event or Congress Novice Pairs).
Club-nomination:
Waikato Bays clubs may nominate any member of their club with a brief explanation as to why they wish to nominate this player.

Closing date for nominations will be 25 August 2017.
For each category, all names will go into a “hat” and two names in each category will be drawn soon after the closing date. If there are insufficient nominations at the closing date then those nominated are selected.

Please send your nomination to the Waikato-Bays Secretary with a list of tournaments played in between 1st September last year and 31st August this year (self-nomination) or brief explanation (club-nomination).