perfectly legitimate.
Here I begin to tread upon delicate ground, for though whist is
entirely made up of conventions, many different views are held as to
what a convention is (see note page 60), and when it is and is not
legitimate.
Between the Albert Club and the Bloomsbury back parlour there is a
great gulf fixed—
“_Virginibus puerisque canto_,”
and it would be a life-long regret to me if I seduced them from the
paths of rectitude.
Still, for practical purposes, I should imagine that a mode of
play which is known, or open to be known by all players, and which
contravenes neither the laws nor the etiquette of whist, fulfils all
the necessary conditions; at all events, it satisfies my moral sense.
If, in addition, it is conducive to trick making,—as it undoubtedly
is—I hail it with effusion.
With innumerable treatises; treatises on developments, on counting
number, on exceptional play; treatises philosophical and treatises
mathematical; with exercises in simple addition; with arrangements for
exorcising superfluous winning cards as elaborate as if winning cards
were enemies of the human race, and a direct emanation from the evil
one, the time has arrived, if possible, to import a little common-sense
into the game, and to make an effort to win an occasional trick.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[28] This is one of the numerous points where the new man and the man
of the stone age—now politely termed “fossil”—come into collision. “We
do not think that a _hard and fast rule_, (the italics are mine) such
as you propose, can be laid down.” Even if it were a hard and fast
rule—which it is pre-eminently not—his objecting to it on that ground
would be most inconsistent—
“And yet he thinks what’s pious in
The one, in th’ other is a sin.”
[Illustration]
LECTURE VI.
——
THE ELEVEN RULE (_by desire_).
——
“Three wise men of Gotham
Went to sea in a bowl;
If the bowl had been stronger
My tale had been longer.”
THIS lecture, though quite irrelevant, is given to gratify the
curiosity of many youthful enquirers.
The eleven rule (which only applies to American leads) is simply this:
that, if under favourable circumstances, you add certain integers
together and the result should be eleven, then you shall see what you
shall see. (It can scarcely be called a novelty, for it seems to have
been well known to Virgil,
“Magnus ab integro sœclorum nascitur ordo.”)
Bearing this cardinal fact firmly in mind, supposing a deuce is led—and
it is _ex rei necessitate_ a fourth best; this is the favourable
circumstance just referred to—then, if you hold nine higher cards of
the suit, you add nine to the pips on the deuce, and if you add it
correctly and it comes to eleven, you play the lowest of your superior
cards, and (with the proviso the suit is trumps) win the trick.
Though it is scarcely an epoch-making discovery,[29] still it is
true, and that in these days of the new journalism is something to be
thankful for.
There is one example of this rule in the “Field” which is to me a
source of perennial joy.
The second player who holds the ace, the king, the queen, the knave,
and the eight of hearts, to his own enquiry which card he ought to play
on the six led, replies, “I say the eight!”
Now, though certainly 6 + 5 = 11, and the rule—as I have already
admitted—is true, this play does not commend itself to my intelligence,
and I should advise you not to trouble your youthful brains about the
later rounds of a plain suit—when the leader, to your own certain
knowledge, has from four to eight, and you yourself follow holding
five, including a quart major. If you win the first four tricks in it,
you will do as much as you can reasonably expect, and will have done
enough for glory.
_O sancta simplicitas!_ That eight, so innocently stepping to the
front, has done more to reconcile me to human nature than anything
that was ever done by Jonas Chuzzlewit.
May it continue to retain its evergreen faith unspotted of the world!
“May no ill dreams disturb its rest,
No deeds of darkness it molest,”
and that it may never be rudely awakened to find a serpent in its Eden,
and the harmless looking six a singleton, is my fervent prayer.
I have mentioned that this kind of thing is not whist as played in
this country, and it is by no means certain it will long be the whist
of any country; for I hear that in the American Whist Club of Boston,
“they have now quite chucked the American leads,” and one of the later
Cavendishes has propounded this singular view; “I have the craze for
giving information in such an acute form that I should like to be
allowed to show my whole hand to the whole table before the first lead,
on the condition that my cards are not to be called.” I presume all the
hands must be exposed, otherwise this is merely an offer to back his
partner against his two opponents at single dummy, and there is nothing
particularly sporting in that.
If, then, this doctrine and position is a rule of faith and not merely
a pious opinion—and pious opinions have a nasty knack of becoming
extended into principles—the devotees of the new game will, it is to
be hoped, at once relegate its uninviting literature to the nearest
dust-bin, and all with one accord, in pairs (like the wooden animals in
your Noah’s ark), betake themselves to double-dummy; where, happily,
elaborate schedules of leads are not required; where extensions of
principle are unknown, and where “faith is lost in sight.”
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[29] “About as remarkable as the rule that if you want to ascertain how
much you have spent out of a shilling, you must subtract the number of
pence left from twelve.
“If the court cards and the ace of a suit are pipped according to their
values, the knave would be eleven, the queen twelve, the king thirteen,
and the ace fourteen; and everybody would see that the difference
between the pips on any card and fourteen would show the number of
cards in the suit of higher value than the card in question.
“Thus, there are nine higher than the five, and seven higher than the
seven.
“They would see, also, that if they could place three, and three
only, of those cards in any one player’s hand—as can be done when the
fourth best is led—the number of higher cards not in his hand would be
fourteen, less three, that is eleven less the pips.”—_Mogul._
“The mountain groaned in pangs of birth,
Great expectation filled the earth,
And lo, a mouse was born!”
[Illustration]
LECTURE VII.
——
THE PETER AND ITS PECULIARITIES.
——
“Petrus nimium admiratur se.”—_Eton Grammar._
“The base vulgar do call.”—_Shakespeare._
SOME years ago a simple piece of mechanism, to which somehow or other
very undue importance has been attached, was introduced to the Whist
world; you play a higher card before a lower one—unnecessarily—to
indicate that you hold good trumps, and _want them out_.[30]
You can want this for two reasons:
(1) Because you have the seven best trumps. There is no objection to
your signalling here, though it is quite uncalled for; if you have the
game in your own hand, you can either lead the lowest but two of six,
stand on your head, or execute any other—what it is the odd fashion to
call—convention the authority of the day may think fit to invent, as
long as you do not come into collision with law 5.[31]
(2) Because you have a good trump hand, and the fall of the cards shows
that unless you get them out, your winning cards or your partner’s
will be ruffed. Here is a good legitimate reason, but when everything
is going nicely, and your partner making the tricks, that you should
interfere with this merely because you have five trumps—or nine for the
matter of that—is the height of absurdity. It may be an interesting
fact for him to know, on the second round of a plain suit, that you
hold five trumps, just as there are numerous other interesting facts
which he may also ascertain at the same time, _e.g._, that you have
led a singleton, that you hold no honour in your own suit, and so on,
but none of them justifies him in ruining his own hand and devoting his
best trump to destruction.
You ought to understand the signaller to say, “Get the lead at any cost
the first moment you can, play your highest trump, and you shall see
something remarkable.”[32]
This is rather a large order, and when you find as the result of your
best attempts to execute it, that that promised something is not
uncommonly the loss of the rubber, though it will be a shock to you at
first, you will soon get accustomed to it.
It is even a dangerous practice to signal when the adversaries will
most likely have the lead on its completion; they at once adapt their
play to the circumstances. I have seen innumerable games of whist not
won, and many a game lost, by absurd signalling; still Whist players
suffering from Peter on the brain constantly refuse to ruff a winning
card in order to disclose a signal in the discard. If they wanted
trumps led, it occurs to the ordinary mind that the simplest plan would
be to win the trick and lead them, and as they decline to do so, the
only conclusion is that they regard signalling for the mere sake of
signalling to be in itself so noble an end that, to attain it, it is
worth while to announce to their opponents that they had better save
the game at once, and at the same time to present them with at least
one trick towards it.[33]
“O scenes surpassing fable, and yet true.”
“By Heaven! he echoes.”—_Othello._
If you only want the odd trick, signalling is about the safest way to
miss it. Any two decent players would, in a vast majority of cases,
get on exactly as well if the Peter had never been invented, while
two bad players—assuming they can possibly miss the game with all the
trumps—generally do so by its assistance.[34] Where it would be useful
is when, with moderate strength in trumps, and the cards declared in
your favour, you want trumps led at all hazards. Unfortunately, if
at such a crisis as this, your partner is not equal to leading them
without a call, he is certain not to see it, although he is missing
all the other points of the game in what he calls looking for it. This
looking for a Peter is an oddly-named and peculiar form of amusement
appertaining not only to Bumblepuppy, but also to Whist. Among all
those people who have attended the University Boat Race during the
last half-century, I apprehend not one went to look for it, they went
to see it, and just as you would see that race, so you should see the
signal. Never look _for_ it! look _at_ it! It is just as obvious as any
other circumstance that occurs in the play; instead of this, after much
looking, it is generally overlooked altogether.
Spectatum veniunt, veniunt spectentur ut ipsæ.
They come to look, and end by making spectacles of themselves.[35]
If you must look for it, at any rate don’t look for it in the last
trick; you would scarcely look for the Boat Race as you were going to
church the next day. Still, Cowper—though he clearly disapproves of the
signal and calls it senseless—seems, if he is to be annoyed with it, to
advocate this—
“’Tis well if look’d for at so late a day
In the last scene of such a senseless play.”
What the signal for trumps ought to be, and what strength in trumps
justifies a signal are clearly laid down by Clay.
If you see a call and hold the ace and any number of trumps, play the
ace—there can be no danger of dropping your partner’s king—and if you
had originally more than three, continue with the lowest; but if you
are quite sure that leading trumps is the only way to miss or lose the
game, don’t lead them at all. Often as, in obedience to my partner’s
call, I slam in an ace and play my best trump, Elaine’s despairing cry
rises to my lips,—
“Call and I follow, I follow, let me die.”
This important fact is too much lost sight of: that the object of Whist
is not so much to lead the lowest but one of five, or to signal, as
to win the game; these and other fads may or may not be means to that
end, but the end itself they emphatically are not; in their inception,
at any rate, they were intended to be your instruments. Don’t let this
position be reversed; whether, like fire, they are always good servants
may be open to argument, but their resemblance in the other respect is
perfect.
One aspect of signalling has been overlooked in all the treatises on
Whist. I have seen a player of great common-sense and acute observation
signal having three small trumps and a short suit, and by this means
induce his watchful opponents to force him to make them all. I do not
recommend such devious courses to you, even if they are lawful in a
Christian country (of which I have doubts); they are only practicable
when you are playing very good Whist, and this, as Clay says, can only
be the case when you thoroughly know your men.
Hair-splitting about the legitimacy of the Peter is beyond the scope of
these remarks; what is lawful is not necessarily expedient: this the
Apostle Paul pointed out, long before either the foundations of New
Orleans were laid, or Columbus discovered America; but when Professor
Pole—who appears to have been acquainted with the present mode of
signalling for forty years (_Fortnightly Review_, April, 1879), and for
nine has advised _learners_ with five trumps _always_ to ask for them
(_Theory of Whist_, page 65)—begins at this eleventh hour to find fault
with the practice, and to have his suspicions that it is immoral; this
is the Gracchi complaining of sedition with a vengeance.
“A merciful Providence fashioned him holler,
A purpose that he might his principles swaller.”
In this year of grace, good players have long known that signalling
is by no means an unmixed benefit, but rather an edge-tool dangerous
to play with,[36] while it has been so long rampant that it has
permeated the very lowest strata. If at such a time as this—when all
the tenth-rate Whist players in Christendom and Jewry not only think
they know all about it, and consider it in itself the quintessence of
science, when many of them by constant practice have actually acquired
such skill that their hesitation in playing first a ten and then a
deuce is sometimes scarcely perceptible—the professor imagines that any
words of his can put a stop to it, his courage is only equalled by that
of the well-known Mrs. Partington with her mop. A child may start an
avalanche; but once started it runs its appointed course, and in one
respect it is preferable—it is sooner over—for there is no instance
recorded in history of an avalanche keeping on for forty years.
In bumblepuppy the proceedings are so complicated and peculiar, they
must be seen to be appreciated; but there are five common forms you
should be acquainted with.
(1) After you have had a lead or two and got rid of your winning cards,
you can begin signalling for somebody to lead a trump;[37] if somebody
obliges you, and you win the trick, lead another suit, and wait till
somebody else leads trumps again—continuing to signal in the intervals.
(2) You can signal in your own lead, and I don’t know that there is
any objection to your expecting that your partner will attend to
it—assuming he ever comprehends what you are driving at.
(3) You can signal without any trump at all.
(4) You can signal without intending to do so.
(5) If by any odd chance there should be no signal about, you can
imagine there is and act accordingly.
To obviate the evident disadvantages and mutual recrimination which
might ensue from such vagaries, if you really intend to signal, it is
usual to take the following precautions:
(1) Always signal with your highest card.
(2) Pause before you play it.
(3) Put it down not only with emphasis, but in a special corner of the
table mutually agreed upon beforehand. (Note,[30] page 59.)
(4) As soon as the trick is turned, ask to see it. (See note to Law 91).
“Why the wicked should do so,
We neither know, nor care to do.”
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[30] The origin of the signal is as clear as mud, and the very name of
the inventor of the well-known dodge of playing an unnecessarily high
card to induce the opponents to lead him a trump, is lost in the mists
of antiquity.
[31] People do not seem at all agreed what a convention is. I used to
be under the impression myself that it was an assembly of notables—a
sort of liberal four hundred, or what is called in America a caucus.
It is described by Childe Harold as a dwarfish demon that foiled the
knights in Marialva’s dome, while I find in the _Fortnightly Review_,
April, 1879, “Conventions are certain modes of play established
by preconcerted arrangement;” by whom established, preconcerted,
or arranged is not mentioned; and I am very much afraid that this
definition leaves a loop-hole for winking at your partner when you want
trumps led—of course “by preconcerted arrangement”—otherwise it would
be unfair and (as he might mistake it for a nervous affection of the
eyelid) absurd. At Whist you can call anybody or anything whatever you
please; I have been told, but I scarcely believe it, that you can call
the knave of hearts “Jakovarts.” Poets (also an irritable race) have
the same licence, and for general purposes, according to Mr. Squeers,
there is no Act of Parliament against your calling a house an island;
but when you come to definitions, you must be more particular, or you
will land in a hole.
[32] It is only right that I should state here that these are not
modern opinions, they are the opinions of Clay, and I am informed he is
rapidly becoming obsolete. This may be the case. I know the practice of
numbers who call themselves Whist-players is entirely opposed to his
theory; still, though I don’t like to prophesy (having a high respect
for the proverb that it is dangerous to do so, unless you know), I am
open to make a small bet that the Peter will be obsolete first.
[33] I have seen a _player_ signal twice consecutively, and lose a
treble each hand.
With the score three all, I have seen the original leader, holding ace,
knave, nine, to five trumps, and the ten turned up—play a singleton,
knock his partner’s king on the head, and then begin to signal, while
the adversaries were making the next two tricks in that very suit: his
partner ruffed the fourth, and with king and queen of the two unopened
suits, led the queen of trumps, killed the king in the second hand, and
the signaller then proceeded to wait about, and with all the remaining
trumps on his right, eventually lost three by cards.
I have seen another _player_ of many years’ standing first lead a plain
suit and then call; his partner echoed it, and they lost four by cards,
and I _have been told_ that some time after a table had broken up,
and three of the party had left the house, one of the club servants,
entering the card-room, found the fourth still sitting at the table,
and continuing to signal.
[34] “Signalling has placed a dangerous weapon in the hands of an
injudicious player. Weak players avoid leading a trump, watching for
some invitation from their partner. Weaker players still are constantly
examining the tricks; and finding in the position of the cards,
accidentally disarranged in turning, an indication of a call, lead
trumps, perhaps to the ruin of the game.”—_Mr. F. H. Lewis._
“We do not know whether anyone has ever kept a record of the number
of tricks lost by Petering. During the past year in the Whist we have
witnessed we feel confident that more tricks have been lost than won by
this practice.”—_Westminster Papers._
After many years’ further experience I am quite of the same opinion.
[35] “They are looking for Peters and the lowest but one, but they
never think of the real points of the game.”
“They are always on the look out for it, and they spend more
time and trouble about the signal than about all the rest of the
play.”—_Westminster Papers._
[36] Even in board schools forcing the strong hand is a part of the
ordinary curriculum.
“Always force the strong.”—_Mathews._
There used to be some difficulty in ascertaining which was the strong
trump hand, but the signal has done away with that.
[37] “Many times this kind of signal comes after the player has had the
lead, and when nothing of importance, speaking from our own knowledge,
has taken place to justify a signal. We are very careless about leading
trumps when our partner has had the chance and did not lead them.”
“It is a sign of weak play if you first lead out your winning cards,
and then lead trumps; it shows ignorance of the principles of the game.
If it was advisable to lead trumps at all, it should be done before you
led out your winning cards.”—_Westminster Papers._
These are noble sentiments! how any sane human being can imagine he has
the right to tell me to destroy my hand and do for him—after he has
drawn his own teeth—what he was afraid—before that operation—to do for
himself, I have never been able to understand.
[Illustration]
LECTURE VIII.
——
FALSE CARDS, LOGIC, LUCK.
——
“And shall we turn our fangs and claws
Upon our own selves without cause,
For what design, what interest,
Can beast have to encounter beast?”—_Hudibras._
THERE are three kinds of false cards—
(1) Those that deceive everybody;
(2) Those that deceive your opponents only;
(3) Those that deceive your partner only; and a sparing use of the two
first—especially towards the end of a hand—is often advantageous;[38]
but in playing cards that deceive everybody, you must be prepared to
take entire charge of the game yourself, or you will probably have your
conduct referred to afterwards. The third is sacred to bumblepuppy.
One thing is very certain, that the original leader is never justified
in playing a false card.
Clay’s conclusion does not altogether harmonize with his premises—a
very unusual circumstance with him—for after objecting strongly to
false cards on high moral grounds, and prefacing his remarks by the
expression of a touching belief that in no other position of life
would anybody tell him what is untrue, he ultimately arrives at the
delicious _non sequitur_, that if your partner is very bad, or holds
miserably weak cards, or towards the end of a hand, you may often
play a false card with advantage: why you should do what you know to
be wrong, because another person is bad, or weak, or because you hold
four cards and not thirteen, or even because such nefarious conduct
may benefit yourself, he does not explain, and in default of that
explanation he appears stronger as a whist player than a moralist.
But the logic of whist is a thing _per se_, utterly dissimilar to any
known form of argument;[39] it finds vent in such syllogisms as “You
ought to have known I had all the spades, I led a diamond,” or, “I
must have the entire suit of clubs, I discarded the deuce;” though the
usual reply is “the deuce you did,” this is merely paltering with a
serious subject; the only effective argument is to throw something at
the speaker’s head—_the argumentum ad hominem_—(of course this would
create more or less unpleasantness at first, but the speaker would
soon find his level, if you hit him hard enough) “unfortunately this
discipline by which such persons were put to open penance and punished
in this world—that others admonished by their example might be afraid
to offend”—has fallen into desuetude; until the said discipline be
restored again, which—although it is much to be wished[40]—can never
be until the present reprehensible practice of screwing candle-sticks,
match-boxes, and all reasonable missiles into the table be done away
with, you have two courses open to you:
(1) You can give an evasive answer;[41]
(2) You can pretend to be deaf; this is a capital plan, as it gives
you the option either of being unaware anybody spoke, or of totally
misunderstanding him.[42] There is an utter inability to see that any
question can possibly have two sides, evidenced by such remarks as “My
finesse was justifiable, yours was bad play.”[43] The two prepositions,
post and propter, are constantly mistaken for one another—it seems to
be thought that because they both govern the accusative case, their
meaning is identical, or, to speak more correctly, convertible.