Last night saw the end of another remarkably successful Bermuda Regional in the face of some real adversity brought on by the shocking weather at the start, which resulted in many forced cancellations and a number of late arrivals.

Co-chairs Lisa Rhind and Steve Cosham had their hands full but, with the help of their Committee, kept things going to a point where one would not have thought there were any problems.

Helping in this were the decision makers at the Hamilton Princess who worked with Lisa and Steve to minimise the logistical and financial impact on the attendees.

Surprisingly, despite all this, table count was up on last year and would probably have been up 15 to 20 per cent had the weather not intervened, just an excellent outcome. Playing conditions were great, the visitors once again enjoyed Hamilton and with some great panel shows, a really fun closing dinner and prize-giving, and the entertaining and interesting daily bulletins put out by Janet Evans, the whole week was a huge plus.

Talking of the daily bulletins — they are a huge part of the Regional experience and Janet puts out a superb product. There is, however, a ton of production and technical work that then goes into putting out the slick final version that is ready every morning, and for that we rely on and are grateful for the team at Tops Bermuda.

It’s a big production job, done in the early hours of the morning with high speed colour printers and other equipment and huge thanks to Claude Guay for making it all happen — it is wonderful to see someone giving back to the game and the people that have brought him so much pleasure — and, always with bridge, pain! The Tops team certainly lived up to their name.

I will leave a full recap of the results for next week. There were many local successes, especially in the lower strata. It is tough for local pairs in the Open events with a number of professionals coming in from abroad, and the master points racked up by Gail Greenberg and Jeff Hand, and Radu Nistor and Barbara McLendon, don’t leave much for anyone else! There is, at the time of writing, a dogfight for the Norman Bach Trophy for the leading local masterpoint winner — more on that also next week.

Today’s hand (see Figure 1) can be titled “More than one way to skin a cat!”

North’s cue of three spades promised a sound raise to four hearts. As South had a little extra, he cue-bid his Ace of clubs. North then checked on key cards before bidding the slam and when South showed two (including the trump King) North bid the heart slam. West led the King of spades.

After dummy appeared, declarer paused to make a plan. After noting that he had 11 tricks, declarer saw that if trumps were no worse than 3-1 then he could draw trumps, cross to dummy with the Ace of diamonds and play a club to his Queen.

Whether that won or lost, he would discard a club on a good diamond and cash the Ace of clubs before ruffing his low club in dummy. Either way, he was sure of at least 12 tricks.

This declarer was good however, and he next paused to consider what he could do if the trumps proved to be 4-0. He quickly saw that, while he could fall back on the club finesse, a better chance was to ruff two spades in hand, yielding the twelfth trick with the second ruff.

Accordingly, declarer ruffed the two of spades at trick two. Then declarer cashed the King of trumps and led a low trump to dummy’s Queen. After ruffing the Jack of spades low, declarer cashed the Jack of trumps.

All that remained was to cross to dummy with a low diamond to the Ace and draw East’s last trump with the Ace.

Declarer now spurned the club finesse and claimed his contract on the basis of his four winners in the minors — he deliberately avoided the club finesse as, on the bidding, it looked likely to fail — beautiful play! Notice that if declarer fails to ruff a spade at trick two on the above layout, the contract is unmakeable.

Yet another example of planning ahead when everything looks easy — declarer asked himself what could go wrong, catered for a 4-0 trump break and was well rewarded.

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