Quiz Answers

I'm sure you're all dying to know what the answers were to my little quiz the other day. Here they are:

1. Alnwick Bridge Club is our most Northerly club.
2. Ann Owen is our most Southerly fully EBUTA-qualified teacher. Do a search for her and you'll see why nobody got this one right! She was narrowly further South than Ivor McGloughlin. I was very amused by one respondent answering 'Ayn Rand': a reference to Atlas Shrugged?
3. This one's easy to answer if you use the map. Just type 'ace' into the search box and you get: Ace Of Clubs, Aces Bridge Club, Bristol Aerospace Bridge Club, Five Aces Bridge Club.
4. A similar approach will get you Brentwood & District Bridge Club.
5. Since I didn't lay down any rules for this question, there could be all sorts of right answers. If you include hyphens and spaces in the name's length then I think Stratford-Upon-Avon Bridge For All Bridge Club wins it. But Yeovil & District Contract Bridge Association would take it over if we expanded the ampersand. Hallam Community Youth Assoc Bridge Club would win if we didn't include punctuation, didn't expand ampersands but did expand the 'Assoc'. I think. I'm confusing myself now. If you wrote down anything over 35 characters, you get a point. If you wrote down Ace of Clubs, I'm pretty sure that's the shortest and you get -1 points.

For the tie-breaker, there are 851 club venues marked on our map. 687 lie West of the meridian, 162 lie East of it and 2 lie directly on it.

And who, of the thousands of entries that were sent in, was the winner? Congratulations to Michael Byrne of Manchester! The admiration and respect of bridge players country-wide is yours. If you come across him at the bridge table in Brighton, make sure you throw him some match points.

A map to help your quiz efforts

I can tell that some of you might be struggling with the answers to my earlier quiz, so I'm going to give you a little bit of help. I've quickly put together a web page that shows, on a map, where all the bridge clubs and teachers are.

Click here to view

It takes a little while to load up all the data and it really is best if you have a broadband connection.

The map is fully dynamic — if you've used Google Maps before then you'll be familiar with the functionality. You can use the navigation controls in the top left to move around and zoom in. You can also click and drag the map to move it or double-click to zoom in.

There are four different types of markers on the map (currently). Only the county markers are visible at the default zoom level but if you zoom in three times or more these will disappear and the others will be shown. The different markers are as follows:

County marker. On the map this will also have the three-letter county code shown. Hover your mouse over the marker if you're unsure which county it is. Clicking on a county marker opens up a window where you can go to the county's website or list that county's affiliated clubs.

Precise club marker. Red markers show (we hope) the exact position of a club venue. Click the marker to open up a tabbed window with all sorts of information on the club, including contact details, playing sessions and what facilities the club offers. Hover your mouse over any icon which you can't decipher and it will give a brief description.

Imprecise club marker. Pink markers correspond to the approximate position of a club venue. We hope they're in more or less the right place (i.e. within a few streets), but we can't promise anything. If you're involved in a club and want to turn your pink marker red, click the checkbox below the map and then click on the exact position of your club building (switching to satellite view might help). It will pop up with a window showing the latitude and longitude of the point you clicked which you can send to me in an email.

Note: club markers refer to the venue of the clubs. This isn't necessarily the postal address. If a club has more than one venue then they will get more than one marker on the map and searches for the club will show multiple results. Also, all the clubs shown have given us permission for their details to appear on the website. If you want your club shown and you're affiliated to the EBU, let us know and we'll get it added.

Teacher marker. Click the marker to see further information about the teacher. It's important to note that the location of the marker is only the general area of the teacher and doesn't in any way give an indication of where that teacher lives. If any teacher wants to move their marker then follow the procedure described above for moving club markers.

Note: only EBUTA teachers with a Full or Professional status are eligible to appear on the map.

The Search Box

Instead of panning and zooming the map to find the information you're looking for, you can instead use the search box in the top right. This works in two ways. First of all, you can type in your postcode or home town and then press the search icon (a pair of binoculars that appears just under the box) or press return. This will then attempt to find the location you've entered and will move the map to that place. For instance, try entering the following queries and pressing enter:

'leicester'
'bn20'
'hp19 8az'
'10 downing street, london'

The map can show the whole world so if it doesn't recognise a UK place name, note that it will search further afield, possibly with ridiculous results. County names aren't recognised directly, so entering 'yorkshire' will put you in Ohio!

The second use for the search box is to quickly find a club that you already know the name of. For instance, if you want to find the Young Chelsea Bridge Club but you're not entirely sure where it is, just type 'young chelsea' into the search box. This will bring up a link which you can click and go directly to the club's details. You can also search for teacher names in this way, and even the club contact's name.

If there are more than 12 items found in the search then use the green arrows to move forward and backward through the list.

For the computer experts out there, I should point out that the search box uses regular expressions to match the search terms. So you can search for '[0-9]' to bring up a list of all items with a number in them.

To bring up a list of clubs within a county, you can do a special search. Type 'county:' followed by the name of the county (the first few letters should do) and it will list them all for you. You can also do this search by clicking on a county marker and clicking the 'list clubs' icon on the popup.

I hope you find the map useful for answering the quiz questions. You can all get down to trying to win that prize now. If you have any comments on the map or see some problems then feel free to email in or leave a comment below.

Quiz

Here's a little quiz for you all on a Summer afternoon. The winner gets a fabulous prize*.

1. What is the most Northerly EBU-affiliated bridge club?
2. Who is the most Southerly fully EBUTA-certified teacher?
3. Name four EBU-affiliated bridge clubs with an 'ace' in their name.
4. Name one EBU-affiliated bridge club with a 'two' in its name.
5. Which EBU-affiliated bridge club has the longest name?

As a tie-breaker, how many EBU-affiliated bridge clubs are there in the Eastern Hemisphere (i.e. East of zero longitude)?

Answers on a postcard please or, for those of you up on your modern technology, by email.


* Prize will be the admiration and respect of all bridge players. Prize will be sent by recorded delivery. All officers and employees of the EBU and their bridge partners are ineligible to win the prize (they already have it).

Awareness days

I have spoken to many non bridge players about my role to promote the game. Many of them view the game as dusty, complicated and too much like hard work! Although teaching bridge at schools and universities has proven to be an excellent method of introducing the game to people, we inevitably miss those who have not been given this opportunity. As such, it was became obvious that one of the best ways in promoting the game to the general public was to give them the chance to "have a go" at a bridge awareness event.

Over the past few years, the English Chess Federation has held events in and around York for local Yorkshire schools to take part and learn the game of Chess. Last year the York Chess Chairman, Peter Cloudsdale, decided that he would like to make this bigger and invited the English Bridge Union to help celebrate the two games at the National Railway Museum, York on 13 April 2008. The museum was an ideal venue to show people the game of bridge, as it is the largest railway museum in the world, responsible for the conservation of the British national collection of historically significant railway vehicles and other artefacts. Each weekend they welcome hundreds of visitors and our exhibition was a great opportunity for visitors to learn something new, whilst having a look at the trains!

It was a very successful day with over a hundred visitors coming to learn the game of MiniBridge We also taught four NRM staff members and a few members of York Chess Club, some bridge! Two additional highlights to the day was the York Bridge Club versus the Junior England International team match and England junior bridge international player, Jennie Marvin teaching England chess international Sabrina Chevannes some bridge!

Many thanks to John Pain, Mike Amos and Phil Godfrey for their help on the day. The EBU and the ECF plan to hold more awareness days across the country, so please contact me if you have any ideas for venues.

Bridging the gap to TV

I joined the English Bridge Union 10 months ago and in that time I have worked on many interesting projects. However, after eight months of organisation and preparation, we put together my most interesting project so far – a bridge television pilot! As such, I thought this blog would be a good opportunity to let you have a peek into the fascinating world of making a television programme...

It all started with an email from one of our members, Matthew Baylis who proposed an idea of how bridge could be introduced to TV in October. My role at the EBU is to promote bridge in whatever way that I can and as such, Matthew and I met and worked on creating a structure for a possible television programme. Matthew's idea was to have a fun and entertaining show with real bridge players and our target audience would be - everyone. At the same time it would be educational, so that people could come into it whenever they liked and still follow the game - whether they were new to bridge or not.

Our thoughts were finalised in March 2008 and we put together a pre-pilot, so that we could see how it would work. We also invited two experts to come along – Andrew Robson and Susan Stockdale to give us their thoughts. It was a great success and we understood immediately what would work and what wouldn’t work – which was extremely important before any money was spent!

Over the following weeks a production team was put together and a studio was booked. By 2 May our team totalled 15 –me; Caz Stuart (our director and producer); John-Martin White (our director of photography and camera man); Amanda Turner (make-up artist); Matthew Baylis (presenter); Andrew Robson (expert); and nine camera/sound crew. We also invited 15 bridge players from London and Aylesbury to take part.

Preparation started at 8am, as the team had to make sure that the right lighting and camera angles would be created for our pilot. We also wanted to try and give it the feel of an actual bridge club. The idea for the studio was to have a main table playing the game, and two bridge tables behind playing bridge – these would be the future players (if it was a series). Meanwhile, our presenter and expert were sat in the "television gallery" watching the games live in another room. This meant that Andrew and Matthew could comment throughout and the commentary could be used over the play with graphics when required.

In the main studio it was decided that there would be three bridge games in total and four players were chosen. A camera was directed on each player so that we could gauge their reactions when they lost/won etc. Importantly the show is about the average bridge player and so interestingly each of the three games failed to go the way Andrew expected – but this of course made even greater TV! Each part of the show was linked by Matthew Baylis (for example at a commercial break, we have a teaser question – answer after the break etc). The end of the show was concluded by Matthew and Andrew who award prizes.

All in all a great day was had by all and the filming moved very swiftly. Our director and team were all absolutely professional and extraordinary.

Our team has now started on the post production and according to our director, "it looks great, the studio shots are lovely." Music and graphics are to be added next and I’ll be visiting the team to view the rough cut and discuss our next steps asap. A good friend Matthew Sharrock has worked on producing our theme music too.

After the post production work is completed, we will have a slick and well oiled pilot ready to be sent to various production companies.

Thank you to Matthew Baylis, Andrew Robson, Caz Stuart, John-Martin White, the crew and all our players:Tessa Baker, Ian Payn, Shelia Rogers, Nalin Shah, Dilip Mithani, Taruna Mithani, Chris Elliott, Kathie Gill, Jayesh Shah, Surendra Mehta, Mahendra Kothary, Ashwin Sheth, Satish Parekh and Mo Sayer. Thanks also to Matthew Sharrock who has worked on our music.

Fingers crossed for the next stage. More updates soon.

New Bridge Shop Web Pages

Today we launch a new look to our Bridge Shop pages. There are now a lot more images of our products available (click on the thumbnails to open a new window with a larger picture) and we hope it is presented in a clearer and more easy-to-navigate way.

As always, we're pleased to hear constructive feedback on any new website feature so why not leave a comment below or send me an email.

John's great adventure: Chapter 7

What a wonderful final day. Very emotional for me and I think for the course members. We started with the final teacher presentations and they all did very well. As I’ve said before to present in a language which isn’t your preferred one is astonishing to me. We followed up with some more TD work on the revoke, plus I sneaked in some Opening Leads out of turn to see who had learnt it. And of course they had. You set homework – they do it.

I was a bit surprised when I had to go back to the radio studio. Surely someone else could pick up the CD of yesterday’s interview. But, no, they wanted me to record some greetings which they will turn into radio jingles – the start of a promising new career perhaps:

“Hi, this is John Pain from the English Bridge Union in Aylesbury, England. You’re tuned to Chillieboy on Yarona FM. Live the music.”

I had to do three slightly different ones, so when you are next in Gaborone listen out for my radio jingle!

I got back in time for lunch and was shown the article in the local paper.

After lunch we played some more bridge and then we had the finale to the week. Each course member, well they are friends by now, stood up and said their piece. I can become quite emotional these days and they said such wonderful things, right from the heart that I had a bit of difficulty holding back the odd tear. I didn’t realise how much it meant to each and every one.

We take so much for granted at home but the material I brought has really meant so much. Finally we had the final speeches and presentation of the certificates by a very high ranking Botswana National Sports Council Committee Member. The friends were certainly in awe of her and having their photo taken with her seemed to be a great honour.

I was overwhelmed with gifts which I hope I can get home without damaging. After final photos and goodbyes I was whisked back to my digs with just enough to change before a wonderful evening meal at the best restaurant in town.

I’m being picked up at 7.20 for a short safari round the local Mokolodi game reserve, before going to the airport and home.

Had the tour of the game park – saw lots of different types of antelopes, giraffes, ostrich and their two tame cheetahs. After a late breakfast in the local Wimpy and a bit of shopping I was taken to the airport for the long journey home. I got back to Heathrow at 7am on Sunday to torrential rain, which didn’t stop until Tuesday just in time to go back to the office.

I discovered that their currency – the pula –literally means "rain" in Setswana, because rain is very scarce in Botswana - home to much of the Kalahari Desert - and therefore valuable.

I hope my visit will make a difference to these lovely people. I had a wonderful time.

I would like to thank those in Botswana who invited me – Kaeleboga Tangane who made that initial email request, to the Botswana National Sports Council who paid for most of it and also to Barry Capal and the Board at the EBU who had the foresight to say I could go.

Thanks for reading.

Further information on my travels can be found here.