While lockdown persists and clubs are closed a team of friendly amateur BBO directors began by offering a list of daily 1PM and 7PM sessions open to all NZ players. Interest in the daytime sessions has lately fallen off as clubs return. The week-day sessions (except Friday nights) will be named starting with "NZX Club" and play 14-18 boards of the standard X-Clubs deals with a Swiss draw format when feasible. Friday nights and weekend sessions will be named starting with "NZ Club" and play random boards as no X-Clubs deals are produced for those times. Session results will be reported on this website (Results by Week tab above) and, at around 5:30 and 11PM, will be included in the daily score-across. You'll be able to see how your results stack up in a field of, usually, hundreds of other pairs playing the same hands at clubs around NZ. Click on Read More to .. well .. read more:

Clicking into your name will be part of a larger publication to be made when the final few come through.

The scaling down - or up - is what simultaneous pairs is all about. When club results - say 7 tables - are scored across a much bigger field .. we have 350 tables so far ... they become much more objective. Club results can be "out" by +/-10% over 24 boards when compared with the scored-across result of a larger field. The range, which you can find by clicking on the Difference heading, is currently +9.95 to -9.67 ... both from Thames who had six tables last night. You need about 60 tables before you get results with an average deviation of +/-0.5% when compared to the scored-across result in a really huge field. This is the whole point with X-Clubs - 40% of NZ Clubs are now playing the same boards at the same times in ten different time slots a week. Sometimes we have over 500 pairs competing. When will your club be ready to join in the fun?

On Sat, Nov 13, 2021 at 8:02 AM Name With-held wrote:

... although in almost certain-to-be reduced form tonight. We have 45 heats involved, five of which are being played on the RealBridge platform. RealBridge has taken the bridge world by storm in just over a year and certainly appears to have a role in the future of our game. It's something you can play on a device which might well make bridge, or minibridge at least, attractive to the younger set.

Richard Solomon's commentary, which has always appeared in booklet form, will be posted on the NZ Bridge site after 10:30 tonight .. something for you to read while you wait nervously for the first cut of results. In previous years we've managed 80% of the results in 20% of the time but you never know .. maybe tonight we'll have it all wrapped up by 11:30pm (yeah, right!). Tragically there have always be one or two clubs' results we haven't managed to get before noon the next day. Anna Kalma will no doubt be posting progress reports on social media and this page will alert you to posting updates as soon as they take place. Best presentation is on the Wide View tab above.

Enjoy your game everyone!

You are South and dealer, playing basic Acol. Match points.
You open 1H. West on your left bids 2D and partner doubles.

a) What would you bid holding

AQJ

AKJT

7632

Q2

(OK - no need to go on about five card majors, you have agreed to play BASIC Acol so the opening is 1H!)

b) if partner and East had both passed, what would you have bid?

Let’s take another look at our freak deal in issue No.6 and see what we can learn from it.

Board 13 from Tuesday, 19/10/21
Dealer N All Vul

	874 KQJ62 Q7643
T2 7 QJT AKJT852		AKQJ965 AT K53 9
	3 98543 A987642

The value of weak two suited opening bids is enough to sway me from the standard weak two single-suiter bids. Some readers may even prefer some form of ‘multi’ but I find that keeping it simple saves a lot of mental torture and disasters at the table. That is why I try to keep the Evil stuff as simple and as consistently logical as possible. You may disagree.