Road to BIC: advice from champions #5

Every day until BIC kicks off on 26 October bridge champions Milan Macura, Jérôme Rombaut, Dominique Fontenau and Zia Mahmood will share advice to prepare the main event of autumn 2020.

What is your best memory from a tournament?

Dominique Fonteneau

My first big tournament 30 years ago. The Open of La Baule international festival. I was 14 and my partner was 12. It was a four-day event. To fight fatigue we played all sessions drinking bottles of a well-known sparkling water with caffeine in it. We finished third in the handicap rankings and earned 3,000 francs. I’ve never had any pocket money issues since then. I became the king of pinball and table football in secondary school, which contributed to poor school performance.

Milan Macura

The nicest moment of my bridge career was playing against the top Dutch team in the semifinals of the 1st World Youth Congress. We were down by 30 IMPs after the first segment and we had only 16 boards to win against multiple European and World Champions. I felt the adrenalin till the last board where I had to make the best lead to keep the partscore contract without overtricks. Guess what? We won by 1 IMP and after that the whole Championships 🙂

Jérôme Rombaut

When I’ll raise the BIC cup on 1 November 😊

Zia Mahmood

Whenever I used to play well or fall in love. Both are hard to do these days… So I stick to old memories!

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