Early Pointers about Restarting Live Bridge in England

The Government has produced a roadmap for easing out of lockdown in England and we present a few points of information from it here, to be supplemented once matters develop or become clearer.

  • Community Centres and similar venues might be allowed to re-open from April 12th;
  • However, as this does not allow any mixing of households indoors it will not be possible to meet as a Bridge Club at that point;
  • The current expectation is that it will be June 21 (at the soonest) before all legal limits on indoor mixing will be lifted;
  • The Government ‘roadmap’ indicates that there might be a ‘new normal’ even in the summer which will require some risk mitigations;
  • The detail of any such necessary mitigations will be dictated by Government restrictions and recommendations, all yet to be made public, and local conditions;
  • Being realistic, Bridge Clubs are unlikely to be able to restart face-to-face games of the sort they ran until a year ago, before the summer of 2021;
  • We are planning not to start running our face-to-face EBU tournaments until the Summer Meeting at Eastbourne in August, after which we will be working to return to our regular programme of face-to-face events as much as possible, although some competitions may well continue to be online.

March 12, 2021