We are pleased to announce the Inaugural Irish Individual Bridge Championship, to be played online on the Funbridge platform.
The tournament will consist of a knockout series of 12-board rounds, with each round open for a period of 48 hours. You play your match, with a robot partner and two robot opponents, against another entrant with the same boards, using IMPs scoring.
There will be a national title up for grabs, as well as masterpoints, and the following prizes are offered:
- 1st prize: A free weekend’s accommodation at an Irish Congress of your choice in 2026;
- 2nd prize: Two nights’ bed-and-breakfast and one dinner for two people at the Mount Wolseley Hotel, Tullow (not available for our Holmes Wilson weekend there, as the hotel is fully booked);
- 3rd prize: €150 gift voucher for the CBAI shop, which stocks bridge books, accessories, and gifts;
- 4th prize: €100 gift voucher for the CBAI shop.
The masterpoint awards will be consistent with the size and ranking of the entry. This competition is open to all grades, with no restrictions.
To add an extra bit of fun to the tournament, four of our top players, Tom Hanlon, Peter Goodman, Joan Kenny, and Paul Delaney, have volunteered to act as seeded “stars” within the knockout, with a bounty of €100 on their heads for any non-seed who beats them at any point in the tournament. There will also be an optional plate competition for anyone knocked out in the first round. The entry fee is just ♦100 (the currency of Funbridge, and equivalent to approximately €5). Entries for the tournament are now open, and will close on 17 January, with the tournament starting the following day, 18 January.
You’ll need a Funbridge account to play in this event, and Funbridge have very kindly offered two months’ FREE Premium membership to anyone signing up for a new account using the code CBAI2026. You buy ♦s for your account by credit card, in the same way as you do BBO$ for BBO. If you’re not familiar with Funbridge, it’s another online bridge platform owned by 52 Entertainment, which also owns BBO, and is widely used by American and European players. It’s not so well known in Ireland, where BBO has the brand recognition because it was, and continues to be, used so extensively for our virtual clubs, but it has quite a few Irish devotees, who argue that it is actually a better platform than BBO. If you are a newcomer to Funbridge, the two month free membership will allow you to explore its many interesting features.
You can enter using the QR code below, or via funbridge.com, or the Funbridge app.
We hope that you will sign up for this fun and novel tournament, and would welcome any feedback on it. If members like it, we may look to make it an annual event, and to offer some other (perhaps graded) tournaments of this kind in the future.