Schools Championship - The Form Guide

By Peter Gill

Israel has several players who did well at the bridge games at the World Junior Camp in Poland last year. Their anchor foursome had a great start here, with two maximum wins. Their third pair, whose debut match was a 20-10 win, make the rest of us look old by comparison - Eliron Arghelasi is 13 and Lotan Fisher is 12 and a half. These two are experienced, having visited England for a week with about fifteen other young Israeli bridge players. During that trip, their team won the main event, and they won a duplicate pairs at
Derby Bridge Club against adults. Lotan is believed to be the youngest player ever at the European Youth Championships, being slightly younger than Dana Tal was when she first represented Israel some time ago.

Agustin Madala of Argentina is only a couple of years older than Lotan, and already is one of the top players in Argentina's Open Team, having played in the Bermuda Bowl in Paris recently. Agustin played in the 1999 and 2001 World Junior Teams, and as schools bridge programs continue to develop, there is no doubt that we will be seeing more of these bridge prodigies in future.

In December 2001, England, Belgium, France and the hosts competed in the Under 20 Channel Trophy in Ostend over a long weekend. England won, using two of the pairs who are in Torquay and their reserve pair for Torquay. The losers from the mainland say that the England team will do very well in Torquay. Most of the English players went to the World Junior Bridge Camp in Poland last year, where their names were often seen near the top of the ranking lists.

However, while those two countries will do well, they are not the favourites. Poland are the Defending Champions, and have recently started a massive schools bridge program. In the last two years, the number of schools players in Poland has increased dramatically. They have agreements with government departments that bridge is treated like other sports. At about ten schools, Bridge is a normal class like Maths or English. They have printed over 40 booklets or books about bridge, of which one, the Green System Manual (the standard simple bidding system) Is a book accepted by the Ministry of Education as a textbook. Their Bridge Magazine now includes a Schools section. They had to restrict numbers at a recent Bridge Camp to 220 because that is all they could fit in.

Two of Poland's Schools Team in Torquay, Piotr Nawrocki and Filip Niziok, came 6th out of 220 in the 2001 World Junior Pairs Championship last year, despite giving a five year head start to the field. Jacek Kalita and Jan Sikora came 19th in the same event, and both partnerships have an additional year of experience now. To put this into perspective, Joel Wooldridge and Joe Grue came 108th in the same event, before winning the World Junior Teams (Under 25) a month later. Overall, if any team can finish ahead of Poland, they have certainly earned the title of European Champions.

France, Netherlands and Italy all have successful school bridge programs, so their large player bases should enable them to field capable teams. However, the results of the Channel Trophy, where the first two of these teams lost to England, coupled with Italy's early maximum loss to Israel, lead the Daily Bulletin to predict:

1st Poland, 2nd and 3rd England and Israel.

Although Scotland claims to be the favourites to run last, their Juniors Team has had a good few days and moved off the bottom rung of the ladder, so the bottom places more difficult to predict in this event than the winners.