The last major tournament of the year takes place today, at the Bermuda Bridge Club, which stages the two-session Open Teams Championship.

Both sessions being held this morning and afternoon.

This is always a competitive affair and it will be interesting to see whether any of the established Teams of Four play together, or whether we will see the mix and match that we saw at the recent Sectional.

Next week’s edition will have the full results.

After that we have the Bridge Club Christmas Party on Saturday, November 30 and then the Ernie Owen Individual Championship, on December 12.

A bit of a rest after that for the festive season until preparations begin for the Bermuda Regional at the end of January.

Today’s hand is just so unusual that I had to bring it to you.

With the bad breaks in the black suits and the trump suit, it looks as if there are just eight tricks on the hand, but declarer showed us something different

The bidding was over quickly; North opened one Diamond, South bid a Heart and when North rebid 1NT (which I play as always showing at least two cards in partners suit), South decided to close the bidding with the bid of four Hearts.

West led the Diamond Queen and was quietly pleased when declarer ruffed, as he thought that the defence could shorten declarer’s trumps and take control of the hand. Little did he know!

If declarer ruffs and tries drawing trumps and hoping for a 3-3 break in one of the black suits, he will fail either by one or two tricks; try it.

This declarer, however, took what was an unbeatable line if there were no black suit singletons around, and all because he saw the value of the trump cards, in dummy!

Declarer ruffed the Diamond with the Heart 2 and then crossed to dummy four times, in the black suits, to ruff all the Diamonds with the AKQ10 of trumps.

That gave him nine tricks and the 98 of Hearts in dummy had to provide the tenth trick — contract made.

Remarkable really, because the play is actually nothing more than a dummy reversal, but is very rare when there are only two trumps in dummy, and neither of which are the highest ones out.

This game never ceases to amaze — and delight!