Scottish Schools Minibridge 2025

I took ten pupils on the train to Edinburgh, to the New Melville Bridge Club, joining pupils from Stockbridge, Broughton High and George Heriots. Altogether there were eight tables.

I was impressed by the composure of all the players (age approx 10-12), who were attentive and helped the event run beautifully on time. 

The youngsters I sat with had learned to draw trumps and they counted them accurately. The next stage (for everyone) is to try and keep track of winners. This means master cards (after the Ace and King have gone the Queen is a winner) and length winners (counting to 13).

I saw some good play, but in the pressure of a match situation it's quite common for new players to cash their eight winners and finish in 3NT-1, because they haven't made a plan for the ninth trick, or even counted that they only have eight tricks.

I think this shows how hard bridge is - it takes a lot of practice before good play, or even standard play, becomes automatic. Enough complaining, here are the results:

Well done the top North-South (Raphael & Charlie from Stockbridge) and top East-West (Max & Zach from Broughton High). These pairs bid and made lots of games, so were worthy winners. These results will later be combined with the heat in Aberdeen for our overall winners.

The top HSOG pair were Hanlin and Noah, who finished 3rd East-West. Well done boys!

Scottish Schools Bridge 2025

	CBC locals		+63 IMPs **
1st	High School of Glasgow Seniors (Team Mishap)	Niamh Reid & Rachel Yu Isla Jamieson & Eunice Ooi.	+36 IMPs
3rd	High School of Glasgow Juniors (Team Disaster)	Shiva Viswanathan & Artem Belikov Ashwin Viswanathan + sub	+31 IMPs *
2nd	Hutchesons Seniors		-19 IMPs
	Broughton High		-49 IMPs
	Hutchesons Juniors		-62 IMPs

Our first year at the fantastic new Clyde Bridge Centre. I took seven pupils across on the train. We had five rounds of three boards, with a break for a packed lunch (or a visit to the burger van outside). 

The reason the scores look a bit strange is that teams with adults were ineligible to win.

One highlight was Zac and Lucas (Hutchesons Seniors) bidding 6S from South here:

 

The board below is a good score from HSOG as Niamh & Rachel made 5C from West here. There is only one way to play the trump suit for no losers - lead the Queen. Then if you can draw trumps and set up a Heart trick before the defence take their Spade you've got a chance.

Shiva & Artem and Zac & Lucas made 4S from NS. This needs trump leads from the defence to beat it, else declarer can ruff two Clubs in dummy.

East-West didn’t get very good cards. The best we saw all day was this:

My partner (Ashwin) made 1NT+2 from East. The Clyde Bridge Club locals made 4S here, and 2Dx from North too!

 A few more photos:

The new premises were very spacious and it was great to have Angus MacDonald to help us with the scoring - as we had to fix a few scores when alert players noticed some boards were duplicated wrongly.