IF you watch a thousand ordinary whist-hands, the great bulk will be
illustrative of (1) human stupidity; a few (2) of super-human cunning,
and out of the remainder the faddist may pick out (3) one or two to
countenance any form of mania from which he may be suffering at the
moment.
The first class—always provided that you meet it in the spirit and not
in the flesh—is often amusing.
The second is, if skilful, generally open to the objection that,
as the same result might be attained by a more simple and equally
legitimate method of play, there is an enormous amount of good skill
gone wrong.
The third class—and this is the class we have now to deal with—is never
amusing, seldom skilful, and not uncommonly misses its tip altogether;
for instance, two hands given in the ‘Theory of Whist,’ to illustrate
certain leading principles of the game, were promptly gibbeted by
another eminent authority, and are still hanging in chains in the
Westminster Papers, for September and October, 1873, as “most striking
examples of brute force and stupidity.”
In any case they prove nothing. Suppose some malefactor, with a turn
for leading singletons, were to bring before the public a dozen or two
of hands illustrative of results which would make any leader of the top
card but three livid with envy, at the same time suppressing two, four,
or six dozen hands, where the lead had brought him to condign grief,
would that in any way tend to show the lead was good?
Still carefully selected hands, although we may disapprove of their
_raison d’être_, are not necessarily revolting to the intelligence; but
there is a limit, and attempting to show such a moral as this, that
with king and another, it is dangerous to play the king second hand
on the queen led, because your partner may hold the ace single, is
perilously near it.
I am not perhaps so conversant with the Whist-hands in _The Field_ as I
ought to be, for the difficulty of its Catherine-wheel notation deters
me; but about two years ago, I came across a few _disjecta membra_
intended to bolster up some mechanical substitute for brains, and a
similar fragment with a similar intention has lately been quoted in
that paper. To make the matter more simple we will transpose it from
the first to the third person. “A holds ace, knave, five, four, three
and two of hearts; his partner B holds king, queen and a small heart;
A leads the ace of hearts. He then leads three of hearts. His left
hand adversary, Y, plays ten, B queen, and Z, fourth player, nine.
Neither adversary has asked for trumps,” which is entirely a matter
of opinion; for as no human being knows, or ever will know, where a
single trump is, Z might have begun a call, and finding the whole heart
suit dead against him, and knowing the exact position of every card in
it, thought fit to conceal it. “Consequently two of hearts must be in
A’s hand, and three other hearts besides.” Up to this point, except
the little difference of opinion as to a signal, our unanimity is
wonderful. “All the trumps now come out,” and B, in the confusion, gets
rid of his king of hearts. That brief sentence about the trumps, like
the pie in Pickwick, which was all fat, is rather too rich. If Y and Z
had them and they “came out” against their will, it was rough on Y and
Z. If Y and Z, with the fact staring them in the face that B holds the
king of hearts and A the remaining four—for we are all agreed that this
is clear—took any active steps to induce trumps to “come out,” they
must have been rampant lunatics; even if Y and Z were not lunatics, but
as ardent admirers of the antepenultimate lead, and anxious for its
success, at any cost to themselves, merely did their best to ensure the
“coming out” of the trumps, how B got the opportunity to discard the
king of hearts would still be involved in Stygian darkness. The most
reasonable supposition, if Y and Z really did lead trumps, is that he
dropped it quietly under the table, in sure and certain hope that they
were the very last people to take a mean advantage of him. If A and
B, in addition to the entire suit of hearts, had also the strength in
trumps, nothing could prevent those hearts from being brought in.
Though futile for the purpose designed, the fragment has two other
morals.
(1) That if A and B hold the command of trumps, and an entire plain
suit, they can bring it in, _in spite_ of proclaiming its exact
position to the adversary.
(2) That if Y and Z hold the trumps, when an antepenultimate is
led, those trumps not only appear to “come out” of themselves like
mushrooms—spontaneously and without obvious cause—which in itself
would be sufficiently aggravating, but they “come out” at the most
inopportune moments, to the dire discomfiture of their unfortunate
owners. (If any decently responsible person will guarantee that my
adversaries will always do their best to get trumps out for me whenever
I lead an antepenultimate, nobody shall in future have to complain of
my not going far enough in that direction).
Special arrangements for taking a quantity above five are seldom of
practical use; on the contrary, such suits have an innate propensity
for making themselves unpleasantly conspicuous, without any _mécanique_.
It must either be a very weak cause to require such advocacy, or an
uncommonly strong one to survive it.
Nec tali auxilio nec defensoribus istis.
PILLAR NO. 3.—DEVELOPMENTS, EXTENSIONS OF PRINCIPLE, AND
GENERALIZATIONS.
The earth hath bubbles as the water hath,
And these are of them.
A DEVELOPMENT is such an ambiguous expression (for it may be either
good, bad or indifferent) that, on that understanding, we may freely
admit its existence; but an extension of principle has several
varieties, is as slippery as an eel, and both the extension and the
principle must be regarded with a wary eye.
The principle that is extended by substituting ‘always’ for ‘generally’
and then appealing boldly to history to sanction the alteration
is one form. Another form is to invent both the principle and the
extension when the occasion arises, as in the principle of leading the
bottom of an intermediate sequence, and its extension to penultimates,
antepenultimates, and so forth. Logicians term this _petitio_, not
_extensio principii_.
Even when you have got firm hold of a good principle, or a good
india-rubber ring, you will get into trouble if you stretch it
indefinitely.
There is no sounder principle going than that it is generally desirable
to acquaint your partner with the state of your hand, but it neither
follows that you should place it face upwards on the table, nor avail
yourself of those extensions known to Hoyle as “piping at whisk,”
though the first is undoubtedly legitimate, and the second, if it were
only first duly exploited by some faddist in _The Field_, would be
quite as legitimate as any extension that has appeared there in our
time.
While these extensions of principle are in the air, some regard should
be paid to the interests of that numerous class whose information is
entirely derived from inspection of the last trick. Already they had
to find out in that obscure medium what suit was led, who led it, and
how each card fell. Now, they have in addition, to track to their lair
several missing minor cards, and when they have succeeded in doing so,
to decide whether they indicate a signal, a nine suit, the lowest of
a long head sequence, or the lunacy of the leader. If their happiness
is to be taken into consideration one important extension of principle
must be added to the list.
It is a principle—vide law 91—that we may all see the penultimate
trick, and the extension that we may all see the antepenultimate and
so on up to thirteen, proceeds _pari passu_ with the other famous
demonstration; it also conveys the same kind of information, in exactly
the same way, for it shows those who have eyes in their heads that
which they already knew, and reduces to a more hopeless state of
imbecility those dependent on its aid.
I do not advocate it for two reasons; in the first place, because I
abjure and detest the principle itself; secondly, because the only time
I ever attempted to extend a principle, I was accused of _sorites_,
which sounds like some unpleasant form of skin disease, and such
insinuations, though untrue, are disagreeable. As I do not wish to
expose myself to them, I make a present of the idea to any pupil of the
new academy who may be intent on further spoiling the game.
“One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” and what the late
Government considered to be extensions of principle, developments and
generalizations, their successors stigmatize as—
“Red ruin and the breaking up of laws.”
The present condition of Whist may be briefly and graphically
expressed by the well-known epitaph:—
“I was well, I wanted to be better, now I am here.”
Among all the quasi-extensions of spurious principles, one fine old
crusted principle is in danger of being lost sight of altogether, and
now that attention is called to it, I sincerely hope that no modern
pedant will be tempted to extend it. The principle is, TO LEAVE WELL
ALONE.
Such are the three remarkably unstable pillars, on which rest the
proposals for upsetting the recognized play of the first, second, and
third hand; and if they give way, down comes the entire superstructure.
Happily, the purely academic discussion on the American leads is not
likely to trouble the general public much; its fascinations for them
are not great, but if those fascinations should induce the doctrinaire
mind to lessen its mischievous activity in other directions, it may
yet turn out to be a blessing in disguise. As we are threatened with
a book devoted to these leads, I confine myself to mentioning that in
answer to eighteen enquiries, “What do you think of the new leads?”
sixteen replies were to the effect that a good player, if he took his
coat off and went into the matter thoroughly, might master them in six
months, and a duffer, under the same circumstances, in half a century,
but that in neither case was the game worth the candle; the advice of
the other two, to “go to Bath and get my head shaved,” was rude, and
the latter half of it quite uncalled for.
WHITTLING AT THE SMALL END OF NOTHING. CONVENTIONS AND ELABORATE RULES
FOR EXCEPTIONAL PLAY.
SO many articles have we had endeavouring to explain what a convention
is, from the Cavendish point of view, that at last the common-sense
view, driven from these inhospitable shores by the interminable flux of
words, has taken refuge at the Antipodes; it was seen in the office of
_The Australasian_ in May, 1884, and I presume it is there yet. If at
any time you happen to be passing through Melbourne, and send in your
card to the editor, I have no doubt he will show it to you. Item,—two
long articles giving minute directions when not to lead trumps from
five.
If the basis of play is always to lead the longest suit these
directions must be altogether unnecessary; the answer is self-evident.
“You should invariably lead the penultimate from a five suit of trumps,
save and except when you hold a plain suit of greater length, and then
you should lead the highest but three.”
Oh that mine enemy always would! for, I regret to say, some short time
ago, a miscreant—one of the soundest Whist-players in this country—took
up the four, five and six of diamonds (trumps); ace, knave, ten,
eight, four and three of hearts; king, six and four of spades; and the
eight of clubs, _which he led_. His score was one, ours four. I was
second player, and held, _inter alia_, ace, queen, seven and six of
clubs; and king, ten, eight, seven and five of trumps; my partner held
king, knave, five and four of clubs, and though he turned up the queen
of trumps, we lost four by cards and the game.
Now this is a man who reads his newspaper, and should, in common
decency, have led the ace and four of hearts. Somewhat nettled by the
success of his nefarious play, I said to him, “even if you have not
seen the Fruits of Philosophy, you must know better than to lead a
singleton,” and this was his ribald reply:—
How sad and mad and bad it was,
But still how it was sweet.
To return to my subject. If any one were to ask me when not to lead
trumps with five, I should reply, “My very dear sir, it is not in my
power to provide you with intelligence, the stock in my possession is
barely sufficient for my own use; with five trumps, you should lead
them nearly always, especially when you are very weak in the plain
suits; but if, after acquiring a fair knowledge of general principles,
you are unable to find out for yourself when it is inexpedient to
lead them, I am quite sure nobody can teach you, and you may depend
upon this, that a multitude of minute rules, purporting to explain
to you when you should not do that which you would be right in doing
ninety-fives times in a hundred, are a mockery, a delusion, and a snare.
“Lay to heart the story of that little fish, which desired to know
all the mysteries of fishing-tackle, and when its prayer was granted,
was unable to assimilate its knowledge, and perished miserably from
inanition. At the same time, if, after what I have said, you should
feel disposed to commit those two articles to memory, and to repeat
them to yourself whenever a difficulty arises, there is nothing in the
laws of Whist to prevent you.”
It is sad to reflect that such an incomparable talent for applying
a straight-waistcoat to every thing should have blundered into a
wrong groove; a tithe of the energy and perseverance devoted to
throttling intelligence, and knocking the brains out of the game,
would have placed our villainous code of laws, and our incongruous
and contradictory decisions on a sound basis; but it was not to be;
_dis aliter visum_, and the following pathetic appeal, reprinted from
“_Knowledge_,” has been treated with silent contempt:—