Bridge year almost at an end

The Bridge year has nearly come to an end. The main major competition, which is the Malta Bridge Association Teams Championship sponsored by Hennessy, is the last tournament of the year.

This will be played at the Malta Union Club, on 12, 13 and 15 May. As most of you know, in Bridge the most important competition is the Teams event. This competition is held in Europe every two years and was held in Malta in 1999.

Although the other tournaments like Men’s Pairs, Ladies Pairs, Mixed Pairs and Mixed Teams are very exciting and competitive, it is the Teams competition which takes the cake and is the most exciting.

I can’t omit to mention the senior events as well. In recent years they have become very popular and the playing field is very strong as it will comprise of many past champions. These senior events are held concurrently with the others.

This year in Montcatini Terme in June there is the Open Championship where all these competitions will be held.

The Malta Bridge Club held its annual Jose Attard Manche Individual competition on Tuesday 27 May. This is very generously sponsored by Josie’s son George. An Individual is a different sort of game in so far as Bridge is a partnership game.

In the individual the players change partners after 4 hands, right through the competition and thus you get the result of who played best with all the different partners.

It is a fun afternoon, unfortunately many players are not too keen on this format as they prefer to play with a partner of their choice.

The winners this year were Peter Varley in first place, second George Attard Manche and in third the Malta Bridge Club Chairman, Graham Penney. The presentation by George was followed by drinks and eats.

I am very interested to see that the English Bridge Union is devising a way to teach Bridge in a ‘fast route to learning bridge.’ This is known as EBED. Learning to play bridge traditionally takes a long time and is looked upon by many to be too difficult to attempt!

EBED’s aim is to produce a fast track model where the game can be learnt quickly and players will be able to play proper bridge in a shorter time than many do at present. Traditionally you need a lot of patience and a lot of lessons to learn the game.

Bridge is to be encouraged as a mind game and there is some evidence, not proven yet, that it will ward off dementia later on in life. Besides which this is a game which promotes social inclusion. This is also a very good game for the young and University students. It trains the mind to work out problems, to interact with each other, although it is time consuming.

We, in Malta, do not have anything like the English Parliamentarians have which is an All Party Parliamentary Group for Bridge! These invite schools to Parliament and Play Bridge against them. This is to show how important bridge is.

At the last AGM of the Malta Bridge Club, there was a lot of talk about teaching bridge to locals and foreigners in the morning at the club.

I hope that the club will introduce the EBED system and make the teaching of bridge very successful and fast.