Tolani Summer Nationals – A Curtain Raiser

Tolani Summer Nationals - A curtain raiser

 

The 10th Tolani Summer Nationals tournament starts off next weekend with a plethora of events. We have been particularly impressed by the responsiveness of the BFI to player requirements on more than one count and would like to elaborate on these in the next couple of paragraphs

 

Beginner's Events

The lockdowns over the past several months have had one advantage for the game of bridge. Since people had limited avenues for entertainment, several people took to learning bridge. We have had several organized learning initiatives arise too, some of which can be seen on the BFH Learning page.

The Beginner's event provides an opportunity for these learners to test their skills in an environment comprising of their peers without the full force of the competing field trying to take advantage of the beginner's lack of savvy.

Since almost all the learning has taken place on BBO, it makes eminent sense to conduct the event on that platform.

Participation of NRIs / OCI

There had been many representations made by people during the Dr. KK Bhatnagar Memorial National Mixed Pairs event that such pairs should be eligible to participate in the finals and win prizes but ineligible for ranking points.

The BFI had, at that time, taken these representations under advice and said it would revisit the issue in the near future. Participants will be happy to know that the BFI has favorably considered their request.

No Major Event on BBO

While, we fully respect the BBO platform as one that has helped develop and popularize the game of bridge over the past two decades, one cannot help but recognize that tournaments held on this platform have increasingly raised questions about the fairness of methods used by the competitors in these tournaments. This is not applicable just to tournaments held by BFI or even in India, but also to events conducted round the world.

BFI has taken this into account and restricted competition in all events to the RealBridge platform which considerably reduces the possibility of using unfair means in an undetected manner.

This does mean that a large part of the population who cannot play on desktops / laptops for one reason or the other will be unable to participate in this edition of the Summer Nationals.

However, we believe it is more important the events conducted by the BFI be seen as conducted in a clean and fair manner.

We hope this event is at least as successful as the BFI Winter Nationals were and wish the participants all the best.