Matamata, Te Aroha, Morrinsville Clubs

We are lucky to have Gold Grandmaster and NZ Bridge Develoment Manager, Richard Solomon coming to Te Aroha club to take us through a Junior Mastercass.

Richard promises that it will be a mix of instruction and play designed to interest and stretch our junior level players.

Richard Solomon

Proposed topics will include:

How to use the double? both takeout and penalty.
Opening leads
Signalling to your partner
Planning the play of the hand

Please enter under the Te Aroha programme tab so we have an idea of numbers for catering and play purposes. NUMBERS LIMITED!!

Junior level bridge players welcome - cost for non Te Aroha members is $5 and Te Aroha will provide supper.

Date: Friday 16th September from 7-10pm

Judith Howard is the winner of one of Wednesday’s most coveted trophies. The Individual trophy is held over many weeks and requires seven different partners with the best six best scores to count.
Judith Howard

Judith’s average score was 60.33 which is most commendable as the competition is played without handicaps and four of her counting scores were played with Junior ranked players. Judith commented that being this year’s tutor for new players has helped her own bridge as the revision on her bidding has been most beneficial. Well done Judith.

The runner-up was last year’s winner Ann Ring who averaged 59.11

*stop press ... looks like I linked the hand record from session 1 to session 2 - so it doesn't make sense. Sorry about that - I knew I shouldn't have had that wine. I can't fix it from home but be assured you all played the right boards.

It was great to see many of the big guns from Auckland travel to Matamata for our 5A Tournament today. It turned out to be a great day to play bridge - pretty average weather and Matamata turned on a great lunch and hospitality to keep the 12 tables happy. Rona Driscoll our director kept the room humming with a 12 table mitchell in the morning followed by 2 x 6 table howells in the arvo playing the requisite 61 boards over the day.

Grant and Patrick

And indeed the big guns came to the fore after both sessions with Grant Jarvis and Patrick Carter winning with several percentage points to spare.

Second place at Matamata: Ken and Mike

Second place getters was our new newest Matamata member Ken Yule who teamed up with Mike Curry (I cropped out Mike's shorts as it was making feel far too cold).

Third Place: Ian and Karen

Third place were last year's winners Ian Clayton and Karen Harris who had a good afternoon:)

4th place

Liz and Blair came in 4th.

Best non open

Best non -open pair was Thea Waayenburg and Malcolm Kirkby from Matamata/Te Aroha - a great performance for a Junior pairing.

The best of the Matamata pairs were Anna Kalma and mum Hermanna Hemmes who also won the morning session prize.

Congratulations to Putaruru who successfully won the Waihou Challenge Shield on Sunday afternoon. Helen Doherty and Elaine Saywell were the top scorers for Matamata and also recorded the highest score overall but the rest of the Matamata team could not match their skill. The Putaruru team played consistently and totalled 421 points while Matamata ‘s total was just 378.

Ross Provan organised and directed a system of match –play where half the team played North/South and the other half played East West and every pair played all the pairs in the opposing team. The scheme worked well and was most enjoyable. The day concluded with a lovely afternoon tea.

The latest newsletter is available by clicking here.

It includes information regarding our upcoming Benefit night, Championships and Waihou Shield event against Putaruru as well as what has been happening in the club recently.

The Spa Teams were held on a very frosty day in Te Aroha.

18 open team and 10 intermediate teams turned up to contest the tournament.

The winning Open team (and only team with 5/5 wins) were Aucklanders Tom Jacob, Steph Jacob, Viv Cornell and Andi Boughey. It was particularly memorable for Andi who collected the A points required to gain Grand Master status - a phenomenal achievement for her at just 22 years old.

Spa Town Open Teams winners: Winning team from L-R Tom Jacob, Vivien Cornell, Steph Jacob and Andi Boughey

The intermediate section was won by the Bay team of Gilda Rowland, Tina Dudley, Muriel Cruickshank and Carol Cullen.

Intermediate Spa Town Teams winners: Intermediate winners from L-R Tina Dudley, Carol Cullen, Muriel Cruickshank and Gilda Rowland

The day went relatively smoothly thanks largely to the directing of Norm Silcock and scoring maestro Jan Spaans. Also thanks to the many helpers of the Te Aroha Bridge Club, Matamata club for lending so much stuff required to hold the tournament off site and clubs who came to the rescue to put a team in to assist with team numbers.

Whilst the past few years we have had torrential rain to deal with, this year the old St Joes Hall was struggling to warm up after -2 degree frost in Te Aroha but at least the sun was shining ... or so we thought until some of the South/East players were hit with a bout of sun strike in the afternoon. There was some novel ways to overcome this including the 'napkin tucked into the glasses' method from Barry Jones...

Barry

With only two heats remaining, Lesley and Sonia have recaptured the lead on the WAP ladder after a sensational win (thanks to a blinding afternoon session) on a rainy day in Te Aroha over the weekend.

Lesley and Sonia: Lesley and Sonia

Thirty-one pairs turned up and played a couple of 26-board Webb movements under the direction of Dallas Dagg.

Another notable performance saw Malcolm Kirkby and Peter Daffurn finish as our top non-Open pair after a third in the morning session . Many congratulations to them on an outstanding achievement.

Malcolm and Peter: Malcolm and Peter

Rochelle and Ross
Ross Stewart and his junior Te Aroha partner Rochelle Van Heuven turned in a stunning performance today at the Putaruru Open 8B tournament.

It was sadly noted that Melba Kerby passed away on Friday night at Waikato Hospital and there is a memorial service to her on Saturday the 21st of May at noon at the Te Aroha RSA.

Melba with Ari

While we haven't seen Melba much at the bridge table over the past couple of years, it was nice to see her at the Christmas Party and club members regularly kept in contact with her. She was a long time member of the bridge club - her family links go back to the founding of the club through her brother Lindsay Reid.

She will be sadly missed by those who knew her.

A couple of exciting new developments are happening in this area.

• Vil Gravis, long-time respected Grandmaster (since before 1992) has started contributing commentary on the X-Clubs Home Page
• Pianola reporting is coming to X-Clubs

Vil's commentaries are aimed at the newer players in his home club of Lower Hutt. They play on a Wednesday night so many of his comments are on boards that will have been played at other clubs too. Sometimes he discusses points that pop up in other sessions .. these articles provide valuable insight to all of us.

Bob Fearn, programmer of Compass scoring, is breaking new ground in working up Pianola reporting of X-Clubs results. This means that any registered player who completes an X-Clubs session can now be receiving their X-Clubs results in an e-mail from Pianola. All they have to do is register an email address to get an invitation to create a log-in with Pianola. There is no charge for this excellent service.

Thanks to the generosity of James Ward, founder and CEO of Pianola, it will not be strictly necessary for a club to subscribe to Pianola so that its members can get Pianola results. Pianola e-mails will be going out to any X-Clubs players who have registered their e-mail address with X-Clubs. It's very easy to unsubscribe from this new set of e-mails if it's just all TOO MUCH!! .. (but we hope you give it a shot before doing so).

Once you set up an account with Pianola your playing history will steadily accumulate on-line with the percentages being a much closer assessment of your result than what gets posted on the club noticeboard.

To register for Pianola - click here

Thanks in anticipation of your co-operation
Mike Neels

Pianola Reporting

The image shows what sort of information is accessible via Pianola - it gives you information such as where you underbid/overbid and made overtricks/undertricks ... Once you register - you will get an email after each X-Club session with a link to check out your playing stats.

Anna