When I first started playing bridge some 50 years ago the game was still in its infancy but we liked to pride ourselves on being good card players, and had confidence in our own ability as well as that of our partners. That is not an easy thing to do, to have confidence in our partner, is it?

Wednesday Review 13
It is quite clear that many of our newer players have simply not got into the habit of THINKING about
the hands they play or defend. It really is crucial that you THINK and don't just play by instinct, or
according to the very basic 'rules' you have been taught, because simply playing your cards by taking
your tricks, or by following some simple guidelines will not give you the best results. This deal
provides a case in point.
Board 5 Dealer N NS Vul

	AKQ842 J2 976 K2
T93 A9765 Q85 JT		6 K84 KJT42 Q754
	J75 QT3 A3 A9863

The new season's deals have been available for some time. If yours is a non-Compass club requiring the deals please use the Contact form to request them in the usual form.

Compass clubs now have the ability to access their deals on demand using the newly-released Dealer Assist (DA) module within Compass scoring.

The new work flow for dealers will be like this:

1. Rostered dealer opens Compass and chooses More Menu Items ... from the side menu strip.
2. Selects Dealer Assist to see a screen like this showing the current Week Number and any deal files already retrieved for future weeks. On start-up, Compass will have automatically loaded the files for the next two to three weeks:
3. Dealer highlights a session and clicks on Deal Hands Now. Dealer4 opens automatically with the file already loaded. Proceed as normal with the dealing.
4. When finished the dealer can click on Print PDFs to automatically print Handrecords and/or Traveling Score Sheets.

Also:

• {extra cool!) If your club wishes to put the sponsors' or competition names at the top of the handrecords it has just got wa-ay simpler to do that. Highlight a session and click to Add Heading to Hand Record PDF. The handrecord appears - position the cursor where you want the text to appear, right-click and paste. Bingo! By double-clicking in the box you get to edit the text - font style, font size, wording - if you want. Close and save then print. Magical stuff, Bob!
• Should you wish to retrieve any deal files not on view you can click on Get New Hand Files at the bottom of the screen to make this screen pop up:
  

OK Folks. All scores are finally in. If everything had gone smoothly enough the job might have been only an easy twelve hours and we'd have been able to enjoy regular updates with breakfast on Saturday morning. Ah me .. best laid plans! Server issues dogged us throughout the day and there was trouble with key people attending weddings or playing tournaments on far-away islands. But - we got there in the end. We scored across a field of 970 pairs playing at 57 venues.

As Jan Spaans comments:

• Again it was an incredible team effort to get to the final result.
• The main problem again was that clubs didn’t send us a result file, or to a wrong email address or incomplete files.
• Chasing people nationwide via phone on Saturday morning again hit a lot of answer phones, but in the end it got things moving again in the right direction.
• Once we had at least something, even wrong files, Bob has been a rock in fixing some club files to something we (ie Compass) could handle.

All credit to Bob Fearn, author of Compass scoring whose devotion to the game has made this powerful tool available to us. Compass is Bob's life work and now that he has retired from his day job he has had even more time to put into developing amazing tools to complement an already sophisticated scoring package. From all the participants in the country: a very big Thank You Bob.

Sorted by Sessions (click the Sessions column header)Did you know that you can sort the data in a Ladder-type results file? Just click on the column header and you can rank by any of Grade-Sort, Club, Sessions, or any other column. Here is a shot of everyone who has racked up more than 130 sessions in the last 50 weeks as at start of August. Fifty weeks is the window covered by the weekly Leagues calculation.