
These keen bridge players were awarded their most recent Bridge Ranking Certificates on Valentines Day.
In the back row it's Lynn Baker, Catherine Whiddon, Elizabeth Boustead, Judy Daniel and Detlef Volkmer. In the front row its Janelle Halliwell, Karl Puse and Cathy Nielsen. Also, Marieta Borthwick was awarded her Bridge Ranking Certificate.
Congratulations to them all.

Get ready for the Sloman Cup, a pairs competition named after one of the club's founders and played on the first Thursday of each month from March to December. The first session is on 1 Mar.
The pair with the highest cumulative percentage wins, with the best eight scores counted. Three substitutes are permitted, subject to the club's Substitute Rules which includes obtaining the director's approval prior to the session. The convener is Alan Davies.
Vivien Eldridge and Alan Davies triumphed in the 2017 Sloman Cup, ahead of Beryl Dawson and Yvonne Perkins.

Peninsula's commitment to helping our members enjoy their game of bridge: our Improve Your Play lesson on length, distribution and probabilities resulted in lots of ducking and holdups and some laughs too.
This Saturday at 9.30 some of our players are going to learn about the Jacoby 2NT Conventional response to Partner's major opening - see you there?

One of the many tasks going on behind the scenes of our club is the dealing of all the boards we use. Often this occurs on Sundays but you may have heard the dealing machine during some sessions when the volunteer dealers of the week do some necessary dealing to ensure we have boards to play. Even less conspicuous is the generally annual update of the playing cards - this took place during a dealer volunteer working bee on Sunday 4 Feb.
There was a terrific turnout of PBC dealers at the working bee on Sunday. Our dealing system has been upgraded to include bar codes on the boards, making it easier for dealers to immediately recognise if the board numbers do not correlate with the computerised deals. As well as adding the new bar code stickers to the boards, the dealers also went through all the old decks, sorting those that could be recycled to charities from those that needed to be thrown out. We then unpacked the new decks, so PBC members now have the privilege of playing with brand new cards - what a treat for us all!

Our Bridge Education Team did PBC proud today at our ABF Teacher CPD Day: from Anne opening up, Jen collecting registrations, Susan Jensen preparing all the materials in top quality and opening the session, Susan Falkingham running website demos, Vickie Busteed looking after book sales, Sandie Rooke collecting the feedbacks and Gayle King providing top class lunch - what a team showcasing our club!

Check the photo album (thanks Heidi Colenbrander!) from the Mix-Up Meet and Greet Social Saturday event held on 3 Feb. It was a great day created by many but particularly thanks to Catherine Whiddon, Susan Falkingham and Gayle King.
The key to the event was the allocation of players from across the spectrum to match those with less experience with those with more, both balancing the pairs and joining club players who might not otherwise have become acquainted.
Fifteen tables played with our new green Basic System Card - and fun was had! And wine and cheese at the end...

NEW Advanced/intermediate Saturday workshops - our first Advanced/intermediate monthly workshop on using the Jacoby 2NT Convention as a response to Partner's Major Opening (instead of a Limit Raise) is on Sat 10 Feb 9.30-11.30am.
This workshop is for keen players who want to add to their established bidding system.
The focus of this lesson is the Jacoby 2NT convention. Players should be familiar with: five-card major-suit opening bids and responses; valuing responder’s hand using dummy points (SP); making a single raise, a limit raise, a forcing raise and a pre-emptive raise using natural methods. We will look at responder’s hand type for the Jacoby 2NT.

Our first Swiss Pairs for 2018 on 30 January was a great success and saw Nerida Gillies and Hans van Weeren triumph (with a box of Swiss chocolates) ahead of Peter Clarke and Jim Rothwell. The turn-out was excellent with 22 pairs playing 4 rounds of 6 boards.
Normally the Swiss Pairs, convened by Annegrete Kolding, will be timed for the fourth Tuesday evening on each month with the next on 27 February (but check the event calendar for exceptions). As an innovation for 2018 we trialed seeding for the first round of the four round event. In future to save time we will probably make this more self-seeding when our pre-session expert presenter is also using the director's computer.