Tomorrow Friday June 10th at the Regent Bridge Club Waterloo Road starting at 1300 hours we will have the final Day of the Ireland Invitational Pairs. This event is the brainchild of Jim Cahill and Ann Tuite. These two bridge people run a great show. Unfortunately for those looking in from the outside the biggest problem is who gets invited and why do they get invited. Well as far as I know they get invited as most of the competitors have been at the top end of the Irish bridge game for a long time.
Now I have become aware that there is an undercurrent of unhappiness among the top echelon of women bridge players in Ireland with the invitation process. However each year for the past 18 years a representative group of our top Ladies has entered the Lady Milne Trophy and no medals yet.
Part of the reason for this is that winning the Lady Milne Trials (or placing top 3 pairs) was the objective. You qualify for the Lady Milne by playing the trials in October November and then there might be a few games on BBO and maybe the odd training weekend or not. Some of the time 3 pairs
qualify that might not even get on as a team. One time when I was present a pair bid a slam in 6C and got a favourable lead and despite the NPC laughing at the contract .."Good start for your girls " a favourable lead came ...a relatively normal lead from the world class player Liz McGowan. However Eamon could see on this lead that a squeeze was coming but despite several attempts to point this out nobody would listen. Suddenly about trick 9 Ireland npc pipes up "Em This might make .. in fact just playing the cards normally and it cannot be beaten" ...
6C bid and made ... the npc did not know how ... I asked the declarer later and she said ... "I guess Liz threw away the wrong card or something " ...
For some reason that pair were benched for the rest of the event .. It was only Saturday morning.
Looking at 2013-2016 Lady Milne results ..we have a 2nd 3rd 4th and 6th place out of 6 teams.
This year we scored 49.5% of the VPs ...but that is padded by some good scores against 3 weaker teams. 6.34 out of 40 versus Scotland and England and Scotland done England 20-0 ..
16% performance versus Scotland and England ...in 2016
Last place and wooden spoon in 2015 ..
However we want to know why some Lady internationals did not get invited to Invitational Pairs.
The about comments about the invitations to Invitational Pairs is all my own view not the organisers.
Now without Gay Keavney over the last several years there would probably be no BBO training or ladies training weekends. Everytime there is some womens training on BBO or in real life Gay seems to be involved.
10 days ago I put some hands in Adam Mesburs BBO account ... two sets of 160 or so .. Adam and Nick used the hands for practice but Adam was back within 2 days ..."Er Eamon each file has 160 or so hands but after 64 ...they are all numbered 64 ...so can you make it better .. "
10 minutes later I had 6 files of 60 or less hands all with different numbers ..
I have not been on BBO much recently but I saw Nick and Adam doing bidding practice several times over last week and this despite having a 40+ year partnership .. still practicing
Also recently I have spotted kinder1 hmg2 coppers tgarve putting in plenty of practice.
I suspect markpm and roryboland are also doing some but as I say I am not on BBO so much.
........................
1. Thomas Hanlon John Carroll
2. Adam Mesbur Nick Fitzgibbon
3. David Jackson BJ O'Brien
4. Ian Hastings Hamilton Campbell
5. Wojech Gorchyca Marcin Rudzinski
6. Thomas McCormac Ronan McMaugh
7. Anna Onishuk Karel deRaeymaker
8. Cian Holland Dermot Cotter
9. Peter Goodman Zia Mahmood
10. Terry Walsh Michael McGloughlin
Not sure about Zia
Other information can be found on www.fob.ie/national and page down a little
to
Ireland Invitational Pairs
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