Playing to Win
Bridge Club still recovering from pandemic impact
The Hot Springs Duplicate Bridge Club is playing the cards they were dealt after the pandemic made a sizable impact on their membership, decreasing it by about 30 people.
The club currently has exactly 100 members and has returned to meeting four days per week.
“You’d think ‘ Well, we just lost them, they just quit coming,’” Clarence Durand, manager of the club, said. “But actually during that time you find that we’ve had that many funerals. And during COVID we didn’t take any new people in.”
Started in 1985, the club celebrates two major events annually: the birthday of founding member Alyce Ebel and the anniversary of the donation of their club headquarters. In 2014, the club was gifted a permanent location by Doris and Bob Hawthorne at 300 St. Louis St. — affectionately called The Bridge House of Hot Springs.
At the event held in memory of Alyce Ebel, a game is played, a tradition carried on and hosted by her and her husband Walter’s children to this day. The winners of this year’s event on Feb. 22 were Carolyn Chunn and Bonnie McDonald in the Category A North/South and Emil Dimitrov and Mack Williams in Category A East/ West.
For Category B North/ South, Tim Kauffman and Randy Gammill won while Joy Bush and Charles Tapp won in East/ West. In Category C North/ South Gail Fraser and George Rice won with Steve Jennings and Susan Jennings in the East/ West.
The event in memory of the Hawthornes is held in October, the month the Bridge House was donated to the club.
One of two bridge clubs in the city, this club focuses on duplicate bridge, which is more skills-based than the luck-based counterpart, party bridge, according to Durand. It also is the only club that boasts an education program for teaching the game to new players as well as teaching special topics for more advanced players, he said.
“I think the biggest thing that’s going on right now for our club is the fact that we have a strong education program,” Durand said. “I don’t know of any other organization in Hot Springs that has any kind of organized bridge education.”
Once meeting daily, the club now meets every Monday,
Thursday, Friday at 12:30 p.m. and Sundays at 1:15 p.m. On Fridays and Sundays, open games are held in which any member can play while Monday and Thursday games are limited, allowing only new players to participate.
Members pay a $10 annual membership fee and have to pay $5 per day that they play. Some of the money per game goes toward the club’s affiliation with the American Contract Bridge League.
For more information, call The Bridge House of Hot Springs at 501-525-8780 or visit https://www.bridgewebs.com/househotsprings/.