Bridge team wins University Bridge Championship

The Imperial College Bridge society was shut down a several years ago but after some convincing the Imperial College Union decided to give us another shot and the Imperial College Bridge club was up and running again in 2010. Our sport once again had a dedicated club at our university (and yes, it is a sport according to the IOC!).

With a very good turnout at Fresher’s Fair and our first session of term, we were eager to prove ourselves as we entered in the Portland Bowl (British University Championship) in 2010. We managed to reach the finals that year, which we lost to Oxford. Despite the loss we were all very happy to have made it to the finals, something which no Imperial team had done so far since the tournament started in the 1980s.

This year we entered the Portland Bowl again for the 2012-2013 season and immediately drew a strong Cambridge B team for the knock-out qualifying rounds. We managed to beat them by a small margin only to find out our next round opponents were Oxford A, who kicked us out of the tournament last time! This was a bit of a grudge match but also a very important one, the winner would advance to the Top 4 and a chance to play at the famous Portland Club in Brook Street. Our team played solidly and pulled off a convincing win against Oxford!

Last Saturday we headed to the Portland Club for our semi-finals match against Cambridge, which has won the Portland Bowl more than any other team. It was a slugfest the entire day with points going back and forth but the overall scores remaining very close. At the end of it we were ahead by 4 IMPs (with over 100 IMPs having been exchanged). But this score was still subject to change as Cambridge had appealed two tournament director rulings which were still being processed. If Cambridge won both those of those appeals then it would be a tie, meaning we would have to play another 6 boards for the tiebreaker. Fortunately for us they lost both appeals and we could get some rest before the finals on the next day.

On the day of the finals we were playing very strong Edinburgh team with players from the Scottish Open and Womens team. They had beaten LSE in the other semi-final by quite a large margin, so this was definitely not going to be an easy match for us to win. Interestingly, neither Edinburgh or Imperial College had ever won the finals of the Portland Bowl since it started in 1984 so either way this year’s winners would be writing history.

We were trailing for more than half of the match and at the end of the 4th set we were behind 15 IMPs. While this was not an insurmountable lead, we wererunning out of time with only 2 sets to go and needed something good to happen. That is exactly what happened when we had a monster of a 5th set and went from 15 IMPs behind to a 29 IMP lead going into the last round. Edinburgh managed to cut down on our lead by quite a bit but not enough, the final score being 126-118 in favour of Imperial College!