The Bermuda Team that travelled to Denmark for the Wuhan Cup Mixed Pairs championship have returned after what will have been a bruising and somewhat disappointing performance — the team finished adrift in last place of the 24-country field. They played 23 Fourteen Board matches and lost all of them.

So how do I describe this result as only “somewhat disappointing”? Easy — because, as I warned in my column ahead of the event, this was a totally different league to what this team had met before, and expecting a team of non-professionals from our tiny island to make any impact in a World Championship class field would be a huge and totally unrealistic expectation.

When I looked at the composition of the 23 other teams my guess was that we had a chance of a good showing against perhaps two teams, and any disappointment would come from the fact we did not do it against those teams on the day — but that is bridge. When you suffer a string of tough results the confidence goes, you second-guess yourself and even the normal things become hard to do.

I thought we might have had a shot against perhaps Reunion (an island nation off the coast  of Madagascar) or United Arab Emirates, only because I’d not seen them figure in any results before, but it was not to be.

Our player pool here in Bermuda is tiny with a population of 55,000, the size of a small town in England, and only one 200-member club, and even Reunion has a population of 900,000 and UAE 10 million!

The remaining 21 teams were represented by a frightening line-up of established and up-and-coming stars, most of whom eat, sleep and live the game, and many who earn a living from it, and the results against those teams told the story. There were some decent results — 29-43 against China, 17-39 against Italy, 26-45 against France and a narrow 36-38 loss against South Africa.

Make no mistake that Bermuda sent six good players to Denmark who had earned the right to be there by winning the regional qualifier, and then took the brave step to go. It is the sort of competition players aspire to, and it’s great that they grabbed the opportunity — it would have been even more disappointing if they had shied away from it, so well done on that.

At this rarefied level, however, the opposition rarely misplay a hand, the defence is usually watertight after the opening lead, and the bidding is accurate and reflects the hours of work these players are prepared to devote in designing and learning their system. And it is tough facing that level of expertise hand after hand, match after match.

I’ll chat with playing captain Jack Rhind on his return to the island and try and get a sense of where the biggest shortcomings were — bidding, competitive bidding, declarer play or defence, and will report anything interesting.

Once again, kudos to the team for taking up the challenge — in a short message from Jack he said they had all learnt a lot from the trip, and you could see a bit of that in their later results, and hopefully what the trip will do is just make them even thirstier to get better!

Today’s hand is a beauty because it is one where most players will get it wrong at the table, and yet many of them might get it right when it is presented as a double dummy problem!

Why? Because they are suddenly forced to think — something players find it hard to do to the maximum when seated at the table.

The hand (see Figure 1) falls into the “two chances are better than one” category, and with that in mind give it a try. And don’t let your eyes glaze over and look immediately at the solution — give it a good bash!

The bidding was over quickly — South opened four spades and North made the obvious raise to the spade slam — West led the heart Queen.

Declarer 1 went down in a shorter space of time as the bidding! He won, drew trumps, and seeing no hope other than a 2-2 break in clubs he played on clubs — down one!

The second declarer did a strange thing — he did some thinking! He thought back to my columns preaching “two chances are better than one” and “when all looks good, look for what can go wrong” and others, and developed a plan.

He won the heart trick, ruffed a low diamond with the nine of spades (key play) cashed the Ace-King of spades and led his carefully preserved five of spades to dummy’s seven.

Now the Ace-King of diamonds, throwing two clubs, and a diamond ruff — when diamonds proved to be 4-4 he crossed to the club Ace and discarded a third club on the fifth diamond — contract made losing just one club trick!

See the full hand in Figure 2.

Yes, of course it was lucky that diamonds were 4-4 (32 per cent chance), but what is important is that it was a free shot and gave up nothing — if diamonds did not break declarer would have to fall back on hoping for a 2-2 club break.

Great planning, great play by ruffing the first diamond high and declarer was justly rewarded — bravo!

• David Ezekiel can be reached on davidezekiel999@gmail.com

BRIDGE CLUB RESULTS

Friday, August 22

1 Geoff Walker/Margot Binggman

2 Elizabeth McKee/Diana Diel

3 Elysa Burland/Heather Woolf

Monday, August 25

1 Richard Gray/Wendy Gray

2 Margaret Way/Martha Ferguson

3 Lorna Anderson/Heather Woolf

Tuesday August 26

North/South

1 Sally Irvine/Sandra Ogden

2 Sanja Thompson/Muna Vallis

3 Barbara Harrington/Eldon Lewis

East/West

1 James Mulderig/Kim Simmons

2 Gareth Cooper/Ross Cooper

3 Veronica Boyce/Carol Eastham

Wednesday, August 27

1 Patricia Siddle/Diana Diel

2 Gertrude Barker/Jane Smith

3 Martha Ferguson/Aida Bostelmann

Thursday, August 28

1 William Pollett/Linda Pollett

2 Miodrag Novakovic/Margaret Way

3 Gertrude Barker/Martha Ferguson