A reader (name and address supplied) expresses his view on why the number of bridge players is dwindling and how the EBU might halt this decline.
Thank you for writing your Bit of Vision leader in the June 2016 edition of Bridge. Although I am not sure that a rigidly enforced systems card can be part of the solution to bridge’s survival problem, there is so much in what you have written that I agree with.
Wherever my partner and I holiday in England, we try to phone the local bridge club and arrange to play an evening as visitors. Without exception, these clubs welcome us. But for many of them, there appear to be dark clouds already overhead, not the least of which are the basic economics of survival. At first glance, those clubs which own their premises would seem to have a sounder financial foundation, but in our experience those that hire municipal facilities make a smaller charge for table money, perhaps because private premises often need a caretaker to be costed into the club’s budget.
The Problem
Bridge clubs are going to the wall, primarily because the number of players attending is dwindling.
For example, we turned up to one Friday evening session at a seaside destination where just two members and five visitors were in attendance. Price never seems to be the issue.
The problem is that many young people have no desire to go to a duplicate bridge club, no matter what the price. There are just too many other ways today for them to spend their leisure time, and they want to spend that time with people of their own age.
You don’t have to scan through many pages of an English bridge magazine to realise that the vast majority of featured players are old and or nerdy looking and — let’s be frank — white. English bridge clubs of 50 years ago may have been more stuffy in dress, but I suspect they were far more youthful and vibrant than today. It is almost as if the people who are playing today are the people who were playing 50 years ago.
When this bridge cohort dies out, will there be anyone to replace them? Will the game of bridge make it to its 2025 centenary?
The problem is that bridge is no longer the essential social skill for the middle classes that it once was. Unlike the daily routine my father faced 50 years ago, job pressures today mean that, after a day in the office or on the road, professionals can no longer guarantee to get home in time for supper and a 7:30 pm bridge session.
What we have also found is that the committees of bridge clubs are getting older. At one club we visited, a chairman in her seventh decade was succeeded by one in his eighth, who was then succeeded by one in his ninth.
People who have not been in employment for perhaps 30 years are finding themselves in positions where they have to grapple with decisions of rapidly increasing complexity. Some club committees are finding themselves overwhelmed by crises.
A key incident gets mishandled; solicitors become involved; the committee tries to conceal what has happened; and members feel shut out because the committee stops telling them what is going on.
The pressures on those involved with the administration of any bridge club are piling up from several different directions:
???? The rules seem to be getting more numerous and more complicated.
Whether this is true or not, the perception is certainly that the rules are being tweaked each year. Every club director, if not every player, is obliged to keep abreast of these changes, for seemingly no gain. One would have thought that the game had been around long enough for the rules to be finalised.
???? The EBU is complicating the job of club administrators by introducing programmes such as NGS and the 70% Rule which seem to have no discernible positive effect on the typical member’s satisfaction with the game.
???? The array of technology available to clubs is growing.
From scoring programs to online websites to computerised card shuffling (and “answer sheets”) to live scoring systems. Each club needs IT literate members who can cope with each stage that the club decides to progress to. The rest of the committee needs to have confidence in both these IT people and the systems themselves.
How can a committee which meets just three or four times a year cope with this degree of change? The short answer is barely — or not at all if a crisis occurs.
In the wake of a misfortune in the club, in whatever shape it may have arisen, some clubs are reacting by retreating to what they know worked before — a chairman who resigns in the wake of a crisis, for instance, may be replaced by an older person thought to have been a safe pair of hands in the past. But such people can often overreach themselves — neither their hearing nor their memory turn out to be what they were, they fail to make notes of crucial conversations, and suddenly they are being threatened by an offended and much younger member with a keen grasp of email, mobile phone technology and Twitter.
How can the EBU help?
???? First, it should argue the case with the government for minimal legislation for bridge clubs.
Bridge clubs are no happier or healthier today than they were 50 years ago. In other words, the new statutes put on the books since then have done no good for bridge clubs, and seem likely to have done harm.
???? Secondly, the EBU should produce regular articles and updates, via English Bridge, on how to run a bridge club, so that all members — not just the chairman — can see what best management practice is.
If the best legal advice suggests that clubs should form themselves into limited companies to reduce their members’ liabilities, then the EBU should tell us so.
Some committees act as if the chairman has absolute power, including the power to select the next chairman. Other committees are held to ransom by divisive individuals who will only offer their talents to the committee if specific other members are not invited to join. If the EBU’s best organisational advice is that clubs run on a voluntary basis should operate on a rotating committee system, such as that employed by the Deva in Chester, the EBU should tell us this.
???? Thirdly, the EBU should devise an unchanging “Duplicate Lite” set of rules which will be just fine for 90% of bridge holidays, club events, and bridge in people’s homes. The EBU needs to recognise that the vast majority of players do not want to play by the same rules as are needed for international matches. Players need to know not just all the standard remedies, but also how to communicate them to beginners in a friendly way, which won’t deter them from ever entering a duplicate pairs club again. Somehow the image of the game needs to move away from rectification and towards freedom.
In Conclusion
Bridge is one of those many occupations in which, one imagines, the cleverest people get to the top. This may well be true, but it can be difficult for very clever people who are highly immersed in their sphere of interest to appreciate the complexity of this sphere.
My fear is that these very immersed people at the EBU are adding to the complexity through their ideas and programmes, and they are also imposing them on the less immersed people out there in the country and abroad on bridge holidays.
If the EBU leadership cannot think down either to the level of its many once-a-week member players or to the enormous untapped market of people who know nothing of the game, then it needs to delegate the fundamental issue of the survival of the game to another organisation.
Bridge September 2016
