The Independence Day BAM

The Independence Day Board a Match Game

Sukrit Vijayakar

Yesterday, BridgeFromHome sort of celebrated the first anniversary of its renaissance, so to speak.

Exactly a year ago, we had commenced tournaments on the RealBridge platform. For us, this was a new lease of life as an unfortunate series of events had effectively prevented us from serving you for a couple of months prior to this.

So, for yesterday, we decided to conduct an event that had been, even before the lock down, conducted very rarely over the past several years.

The event was conducted on a 2/1/0 scale. While most of us have been playing such events on a 6-0 scale (as far as I can remember), P. Sridhar pointed out helpfully in the BAM group, "The 2/1/0 scale is THE standard universal scale -the 0-6 scale is Indian ,,,, ( bloody Indians as Goras would call it lol )"

We had a total of 28 teams participating. We would have loved to have had more. At the end of the day, team Monica Jajoo won the event with a round to spare, with team Coolers coming second. There were ties for 3rd and 5th place resulting in 6 teams sharing the prize money instead of 5.

We would love to have more feedback from all of you as to whether you would like to have more events like this in future.

Memories of Board a Match Games

Arvind Vaidya

Yesterday's Board a Match game invoked a string of emotions in me. Even though I had some other commitments planed for the day, I rearranged my schedule a little in order to play this event

Here are two episodes from such events that came instantly to mind on thinking about these events

My first BAM event was at the Nagpur nationals, held at the Ordanance factory at Ambazari . Our team of greenhorns then, was in the finals, and very early in the day , reached the table of Jaggy and Shantanu , who were easily one of the top partnerships those days . We were greeted with a smile ( and a hint of
" welcome ' bakaras' !☺") . Somehow we managed to escape unscathed ( to our own surprise )

The other episode is from Pune nationals at Balewadi complex ( 1997). Again the BAM finals . Just when round two started , a voice reverberated in the hall : ' director please ' . It was my dear friend, Jitu Solani, who had discovered instantly that a board distributed at round two had the same cards that were played in the teams knockout two days back . The game was stopped , rectification was done, before the game resumed.

Those were the days of manual scoring totally . It used to be quite a sight when the teams would go into a huddle to compare scoresheets and compute scores . The 6-0 scale would apply . Eyes would lit up getting a full six , only to dampen the spirit when next board would be a 0 or 1 score .

BAM was fun!

This can happen only in Bridge

Sarika Mittal

I share an anecdote funny,
One time while playing on real bridge( RB), had the urge to give my opponent a run for his money,

In the middle of the game, his iPad got stuck,
Seemed like he was having tough luck,

With tongue in cheek; I gave him unsolicited advice,
Without giving it a thought twice,

"Please invest in a laptop decent,
Especially if you are into playing bridge most recent,

Don't let this game overwhelm you,
Or let it turn your mood blue,

You will surely get the hang of it,
Everyone including me has to struggle a little bit”

With a calm demeanor and a sweet smile,
He replied that he found my advice worthwhile,

It turned out that he was really an ace national level player,
Who could easily play the role of a silent slayer,

Mortified, I went red in my face,
Alas, there was no way my words I could retrace!

(This event actually took place in the second or third elimination of a major tournament held earlier this year - Eds)

The Bridge Calendar for the next few weeks is packed with a lot of exciting events with many more in the pipeline. As of now, the following events are coming up on RealBridge

Aisha Ladies Pairs (17-18 August 2021)Puja Batra brings this special event for the ladies. It will be held on both days at 3 pm. Prizes worth Rs. 25,000 are on offer. Ladies do turn out in large numbers to participate and enjoy yourselves.Click here to register for this event
BFI Online Inter-State Championships (21 - 29 August 2021)There has been a slight change to the schedule of this event due to the occurrence of Raksha Bandhan on Sunday - August 22. This has been published in various WhatsApp groups.
HCL Open Tournament (18 - 26 September 2021)This tournament promises to be the largest online event in this year in India with the total prize money of Rs. 20 Lakhs. Details of the event have been published in various WhatsApp groups and we expect that the participation in this event will be immense.