Spreading the JOY to all newbies over Christmas ... open access has been provided to the acclaimed MINI-MOOS package. Details of what it's all about may be seen under the Resources tab above (Mini-Moos item). Anyone is invited to use any of the material which is freely available in Dropbox. If clubs were willing to deal the boards for anyone keen to continue learning over the holidays, it would be way better than random deals to play the Mini Moos deals with guided commentary on bidding and play.

Anna Kalma will be wearing yet another hat in 2017, having taken up the mantle of Waikato Area Pairs Manager vacated by Jane Stearns. Although Jane set the bar amazingly high, Anna has made a great start with this whimsical poster of a Mr Wappy van.

A reminder to all who may not have spotted it yet, that this site features a Virtual Notice Board (the blue square to the right) upon which we try to maintain posters for all tournaments in the whole region. This becomes much easier if clubs save their posters in dropbox/Waikato-Bays Clubs Info/Tournament Posters to which all clubs should have access.

Rona Driscoll, chair of the WBRC, writes:
To all Waikato Bays clubs:

The Waikato Bays Regional Committee is arranging for one or two weekend seminars next year, aimed at new and prospective directors. We will let you know the details of these in due course. However, if you don't want to wait, you might like to consider directing training in Taupo during January.

The Christmas Party season began with 17 tables at Thames's event on Sunday the 13th. This is set to be followed in succeeding weeks, like a troup of parading elephants, by similar seasonal festivities at Te Awamutu, Waikato, Rotorua, and Huntly.

Barry & JennyThe big event of the week - in case you missed it - was the Babich NZ-Wide Pairs which was won by Barry Jones & Jenny Millington of "our" Hamilton club. In 4th place nation-wide were Tony Hacking & Pat Rutherford of Tauranga while Neil Dravitzky & Paul Cosgrove of Rotorua scooped up the last Regional A point in finishing 16th. The event occupied 998 pairs in 59 clubs around the country last Friday night. This mammoth turn-out was scored using Bob Fearn's Compass scoring operated by Bob in Seattle and half your regional committee (by coincidence) in Cambridge. Jan, Anna, and Michael sat up for a couple of hours after play to do this job. Next year we've worked out that we can do it split over three countries as Jan will be sunning himself in Rarotonga about then - though probably not at midnight.