Photo of man alone on bench

The club continues to support visitors and other players who find themselves unexpectedly without a partner at a number of its sessions: Monday afternoons (Green section only), Wednesday afternoons, Wednesday evenings, Friday afternoons and Friday evenings. We also welcome unpartnered players at all of our supervised sessions.

We have started keeping records of the unpartnered players at these sessions and there are many. While we encourage these players to proactively arrange for their own partners, we are glad when we can help those who unexpectedly find themselves partnerless.

However as part of our review and better management of our expenses we are moving to the model relied on by many other bridge clubs - that of relying on a list of fill-in volunteers who are happy to be called to see if they are available to come in for a free game with any remaining unpartnered player. From July this approach will replace our past expensive practice of rostering a director to be available in case they are needed to play with any unpartnered player that is not able to be matched with another unpartnered player. Note also that for our large Monday, Wednesday and Friday sessions we have, since June, rostered a non-playing director so that they can manage the large sessions without distraction. 

There may well be some teething problems as we shift to the new approach particularly as our fill-in volunteer list does not yet provide deep coverage of all of the above sessions.

Members are asked to:

  • Take responsibility whenever possible for finding their own partners - including via Pianola Partner Finder,
  • Consider whether they are able to add their names and numbers to the Fill-in Volunteer list on the noticeboard, and
  • Understand that, while in most cases they will be successful, an unpartnered player cannot be guaranteed a game.