Jeffrey Chang

Jeffery Chang

It is thanks to life member Malcolm Smith’s need for a caffeine fix that Jeffrey Chang joined the Hamilton Bridge Club
in late 2013. Jeffrey and his wife are the owners of Urge Coffee and Tea Boutique on Victoria St (www.urgecoffee.com).
Malcolm, a regular customer, was talking to Jeffrey while waiting for his coffee about bridge, and Jeffrey mentioned he knew a bit about the game. Jeffrey took up the invitation to come along and played a few times with Malcolm and has gone from strength to strength.Jeffery Chang

Jeffrey is originally from Taiwan and came to New Zealand in 2002 to study English for a year. While at the Language School he fell in love with a Chinese student and they both decided they would quite like to stay.Jeffrey passed the IELTS exam at the end of the year and was able to enrol at Waikato University where he studied electronic engineering. He graduated but found it difficult to find a job in the area he had trained in. Jeffrey says he struggled in job interviews because of his language and this made it very difficult. He found other work but wasn’t doing what he wanted to do. He and his wife decided to take a big risk and buy Urge. They had no background in coffee but they saw a good business opportunity. Prior to trading as Urge in 2001, the business has been at that location for over 50 years, previously trading as a Robert Harris Café.

At high school Jeffrey played a variety of card games including what he calls Chinese “no rules” bridge. The game is fundamentally the same, but they didn’t worry about high card points or anything silly like that! Having a good rounding in the playing of the cards it was the bidding process that he needed to learn. After a few sessions with Malcolm, he suggested to Jeffrey that playing with someone who could teach him in his native tongue might be beneficial, and so it was organised for him to play regularly with Yuzhong Chen. In his first full year of play Jeffrey earned an impressive 18 B points.
Finishing in 1st place 16 times at the club as well as earning 5 B points after an excellent showing in March’s Restricted Pairs contributed largely to this success. He won the David Head Trophy Thursday Night Individual Competition scoring nearly 70% in 3 of the 4 nights, an achievement of which he is very proud. And to top off an excellent first year, when NZ Bridge released the Ranks Report for 2014 Jeffrey’s name was sitting at the top of the table for those players in NZ ranked at “Certificate of Proficiency”. On Monday 9 February he gained the C points he needed to be promoted to “Club Master” rank. No doubt he will move out of the Junior grade to Intermediate in 2015 and will look to go on from there.

Jeffery enjoys the social side of bridge and also getting to utilise his brain power in a different way from work. You will see Jeffrey at the Club on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays and he is establishing a good partnership with Club President Mark Thomson. He hopes to play and do well in some more tournaments this year and he plans to compete in the Waikato Area Pairs Series with Malcolm. His goals are simply to learn more as he continues to play and be a Master player.


Ed Roggeveen