Special guest : India Natt

✨ India Natt

India is English but lives in Lisbon with her husband, also a professional, and baby son (who hasn’t started learning bridge yet!).

She is a professional bridge player and also gives lessons to students of many different levels who live all over the globe. She currently works online.

When India is playing professionally, she places the focus on maximising learning. She likes to think that she is very amiable and she does not castigate her partners for mistakes.

India began teaching in 2018 and very quickly fell in love with the job. She finds seeing her students improve incredibly rewarding. She also takes great care over tailoring lessons, topics and feedback to the right level for each student.

• 2015 : she joined the U26 squad

• 2016 : played her first international tournament

• 2019 : most notable achievement as a junior by coming a close 4^th in the 2019 Junior World Championships in Croatia.

• She has had successes in several different countries ( Sweden, Northern Ireland, Wales and Madeira)

• 2021 : First win in England

• She quickly made a name for herself in the teaching world although she’s young and has not been teaching for long. She has amassed plenty of experience, teaching both in-person and online and that over several different platforms.

• She has written source materials for the English Bridge Education & Development department (EBED) and created plenty of video content too.

At what age have you started playing bridge?

“I first played bridge when I was eleven, playing on a very occasional basis when I went to stay with my grandmother. I think the players at her local club were somewhat surprised when I showed up at age thirteen to play a duplicate!”

“However, I only began playing regularly when I went to university and joined the Cambridge University Bridge Club at eighteen. Playing there once a week in my first year turned into three or four times a week upon becoming the captain of my college’s bridge club in my third year, when I began to play competitively in teams matches (both within the university and against other teams in the county) and then Varsity (an annual competition against the University of Oxford). I had caught the bridge bug!”

Your best bridge memory?

“It has to be a hand I played with my now-husband against David Gold and Zia Mahmood a few years ago. Zia was Declarer in 5H and I made a killer defensive play (made possible by my partner’s excellent lead) that caused Zia to misguess the trump suit. It would have been a memorable play in and of itself – it was beautiful – but it felt even more special given the calibre of our opponents! It was even written up in a national newspaper afterwards.”