Holiday greetings to all my readers – I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and Hanukkah and are looking forward to a great 2025, both at and away from the table.

The Bermuda Regional is just around the corner, January 25 to the 31, so once the celebrations are over find some time to practise bidding with your partners so that you are good and ready for the big event.

I mentioned last week an event that the World Bridge Federation held online over the last two weekends – it was a Teams event that has been organised for the smaller countries who are members of the WBF, and 31 countries entered from the world’s eight zones.

Jack Rhind worked in concert with the Bermuda Bridge Federation and the WBF to organise an eight-member team that represented Bermuda: Jack Rhind  (playing captain), Charles Hall, Rachael Gosling, Elizabeth McKee, Marge Way, Misha Novakovic, and Bill and Linda Pollett). They played all their matches in one room at the Bridge Club, with a Zoom link that let the international tournament directors see and hear the entire room during play.

Each team played 12 matches against other teams at prearranged times over the two weeks. The matches were played on RealBridge which is a UK platform that has been widely used over the past five years by many countries – Jack has run the Canadian National Teams Championships on there for the past four years.

All players were required to have a computer with both audio and video. All players see and hear each other at the table so as to eradicate the possibility of unethical behaviour.

Bermuda played 12 matches against randomly selected opponents – the table in Figure 2 shows the final standings of the 31 teams, with Bermuda finishing a somewhat disappointing 24th, given the quality on the island’s team. Also shown are the Bermuda scores against each team, with 20 vps available in each match.

Analysing the results, we see that Bermuda won four of the 12 matches they played and had an average score of 7.52 per match. Their average against the top 15 teams they played was 4.75 and against the bottom 15 they averaged a healthy 12.53. Their best result was a 12.61 win against the eighth placed Faroe Islands team.

It’s tough to judge where Bermuda should finish in an event like this – we had four really good pairs playing so I would guess that they should have finished a bit higher, but many of the other teams probably play a lot more tournament bridge than our group, and also probably put in a lot of practice ahead of this event.

I think with some serious preparation and coaching for next year’s event we will see a better result. It is also a bit unlucky that eight of the 12 matches the local team played were against top-half teams, and that is a tough headwind to overcome.

Jack tells me that the entire team really enjoyed the event, and that in itself is huge because that is why we play the game – there is little to compare with the excitement and tension of an international event and I would imagine the current group will benefit a ton from the experience and will be joined by many others looking to make the team next year. A big “well done” to tournament director Peter Donnellan and to Jack Rhind for putting in the legwork to have Bermuda participate.

I’m going to end the year with a hand (see Figure 1) where I wish I was at the table and made the winning play – the hand has stuck with me ever since I first saw it and I’ve covered some version of it before in the column.

South ended up in the contract of four hearts after North opened the hand a club – West led a diamond and East won the Ace and returned a diamond.

Having lost one trick, declarer could only afford to lose two more, and it looked like the only chance was that West held the club Ace. This declarer was, however, a bit better than that! After winning the second trick declarer drew three rounds of trumps ending in dummy and led – the three of clubs!

East was now fixed – if he played low declarer would win the Jack and just give up a club and a spade, so he won the Queen and switched to a spade but it was now too late – declarer won in hand and played the club Jack, knocking out the Ace. Now the King of clubs in dummy provided a parking spot for the losing spade – contract made!

Absolutely brilliant!

Notice that this play never loses against the play of simply leading towards the King – if, for instance West had the AQ of clubs the Queen would win declarer’s Jack, but then declarer comes to hand and leads a club towards to King and again the spade loser goes away. So the play never loses, but gains every time East holds the Ace-Queen …. and those are the no-lose free plays that you must constantly look for.

Happy new year!

• David Ezekiel can be contacted at davidezekiel999@gmail.com

BRIDGE CLUB RESULTS

Friday, December 20

North/South

1. Gertrude Barker/Sharon Shanahan

2. Tony Saunders/Margaret Way

East/West

1. Stephanie Kyme/Diana Diel

2. Charles Hall/Molly Taussig

Monday, December 23

North/South

1. Gertrude Barker/Jane Smith

2. Peter Donnellan/Lynanne Bolton

East/West

1. Betsy Baillie/Joyce Pearson

2. Patricia Siddle/Diana Diel