THE LEAD OF THE PENULTIMATE AND ITS CONGENERS.—Playing Whist some five
and twenty years ago with Cam for my partner, he led the trey of a
suit in which I held king, queen and another, I won with the queen,
and on the return of the king, which was taken by the fourth hand, Cam
played the deuce. From subsequent enquiry I found it was a lead of his
own, to inform the table he had three remaining, and no honour in his
own suit; I had never seen the device before; I did not think highly
of it when I did see it, and am of the same opinion still; however,
in 1865 it appeared in “What to Lead,” and was strenuously objected
to, by Mogul among others; but it is only due to the memory of my old
friend,—in his day an authority second to none—to state, that though
tenacious of his proposition, I never knew him suggest for one moment,
that it was an extension of any known, or unknown, principle.
The credit of discovering a brand-new principle, and that the
penultimate lead is a legitimate extension of that discovery is, as
far as I am aware, entirely due to Cavendish’s unassisted ingenuity;
and here we learn incidentally what, in his view, a principle is;
for, after he had concluded to his own satisfaction, that from suits
containing a sequence that does not head the suit, the lowest card
of the sequence should be led—although Clay denied this flatly,
and objected to the lead in toto—he straightway elevated it into a
principle.
How the penultimate lead is an extension of it, I have no idea; he
appears to have evolved both the principle and the extension from his
own internal consciousness. Anti-Cavendish puts this with such force
and perspicuity in the Westminster Papers, February, 1873, that the
whole article is well worth reading, and in these convention ridden
days is quite refreshing. I make an extract or two from his conclusion.
“The reasoning on which Cavendish grounds this invention is so faulty,
that one feels that in the pursuit of his hobby of ‘extension of
principle’ he loses his head altogether.” “It is a purely arbitrary
signal and might much more plausibly have been proposed as a means
of giving information without all the rigmarole about ‘extension of
principle,’ &c., &c., but then if so proposed, players would have
refused to adopt it; now, as disguised by Cavendish under a cloud of
words, too many will be ready to jump at it to save themselves the
trouble of thinking.” “No greater mistake can be made than to imagine
that it is desirable in every case to give information to your partner,
and players who are always endeavouring to do this, without reference
to the state of their hands, will surely in the long run suffer.
Whether to give or withhold information frequently tries the discretion
of the best players, and with weak hands the great necessity is to keep
your adversaries in ignorance, without deceiving your partner. Now if
this new signal were generally adopted, players would, as regards the
lead in question, be deprived of all discretion, and be compelled
either to give information to their adversaries, which might be used
against them with fatal effect, or else deceive their partners, whereas
the present lead, if it gives no information does not deceive your
partner. Another disadvantage is that in nearly all cases where either
adversary wins the second round, he will know whether or not he can
force his partner in that suit without risk of being overtrumped, but
if the original leader wins the second round his partner will rarely
get any positive information as to his strength until the third round.”
“These refinements of artifice are utterly opposed to the essence
of scientific Whist, viz., the necessity of rational deduction. To
substitute signals which convey information, without troubling the
brains, must tend to spoil the game.”
Objections have repeatedly been taken to these conventions on moral
grounds, but as long as the Church and Stage Guild and kindred
associations exist, there seems no reason why we should be troubled to
look after our own morality.
For my own part, although believing the principle to be extremely
doubtful and the extension far from clear, I am quite prepared to admit
that when you have a reasonable expectation of bringing in a five suit,
it is desirable that you should make your partner acquainted with the
exact length of it, but I am equally prepared to deny its expediency
when there is no chance of bringing it in; if such a suit must be
played, and you may be so unfortunately placed that it is unavoidable,
it would be much better to keep the length of it buried in your own
bosom.
Oddly enough when another writer, emulous of extending the master,
and seduced by the analogy that what was sauce for the goose must be
sauce for the gander, suggested that if it was imperative to lead
the lowest but one of five, it must be equally obligatory to lead
the lowest but two of six; (indeed so clear is this next link in the
chain, that it was the very first thought of myself and some half-dozen
other light-minded persons, the moment we heard of the principle;
but, by ill luck, the seed fell on barren ground, for so far were we
from realizing the importance of our discovery, and taking immediate
steps to protect the patent, that, sad to relate, _solvuntur tabulæ
risu_), we find Cavendish in _The Field_ for a time deprecating such
an eminently logical extension, till I wake up one Saturday morning
and read that the antepenultimate does not go far enough, and that
under pain of becoming fossils, we must all lead the lowest but three
of seven, but four of eight, and so on until we arrive at the lowest
but nine of thirteen, when further extension in that direction becomes
impracticable.
Fortunately this arrangement has been simplified, for the game would
have become even slower than it is, if whenever a player had a ten
suit, he had to repeat to himself, lowest but one of five, two of six,
three of seven, till he eventually arrived at lowest but six of ten,
and after much laborious whittling at the small end of nothing, the
ultimate outcome is, with any number of a suit from five to thirteen,
to lead the top but three.
Apropos of this same ultimate outcome, in the Westminster Papers for
January, 1875, there is a remarkable statement: “We have the opinion,
never published, of a personal friend, that while you ought to lead the
lowest card in four suits, you should lead _the third from the top_ in
five suits;” and this anonymous genius is still “unwept, unhonoured and
unsung.” Such is fame!