John Petch Hewby

“ The constitution of Whist and the constitution of our beloved country are both at the mercy of a grand old man of exuberant verbosity, each of whom is able, in some extraordinary way, to persuade himself that the side of any question on which he happens to be looking, is not only the right side, but that it positively has no other, in spite of the fact that in previous stages of his existence, he has himself, both recognised and vehemently supported that other side. ”

“ The Whist philosophy of Cam, propounded day by day, was, that there is no absolute never or always. The same idea runs through the entire treatise of Clay; and if there is one point more especially distinctive than another in the teaching of that great master, repeated again and again, and constantly insisted upon, it is that all the maxims of Whist are open to innumerable exceptions, that the coat must be cut according to the cloth, and that he is the finest Whist-player who can most readily grasp that fact. ”

“ Though Mathews (circa A.D. 1800) in two short sentences laid down the true and only principle of discarding: “If weak in trumps, keep guard on your adversaries’ suits; if strong, throw away from them,” fifty years afterwards it was discovered by the “little school” that “the old system of discarding was just this—when not able to follow suit, let your first discard be from your weakest suit.” Rough on poor Mathews! but the absent are always wrong. ”

“ As to not heading the queen with king and another, one of the latest Cavendish coups, it is really so puerile, he must be practising upon our credulity; the veriest bumble-puppist that ever [39] crawled upon this earth is too well aware that, every now and again, a trick may be made by the most absurd and outrageous play—or rather want of play—otherwise the breed would have been as extinct as the dodo.
There are positions enough, where the king is the only card of re-entry and where, unless the fourth hand can get in with the ace and draw the trumps, the game is over, but it is not so here ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 [29] 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. ”

“ THE ECHO. The echo is reported to be an extension of the signal, and is the most innocuous of the series; it does very little harm, and always amuses somebody.
When the signal-man holds half the trumps and the echoer the remainder, it amuses them and does not hurt the adversary; for weight will tell, wholly irrespective of conventions.
When there is a possibility of saving the game, and it comes into play before the hand is over, which it seldom does, its usual effect is to induce the signal-man (seeing his partner drop a high card) to endeavour unsuccessfully to force him ”

“ The present practice of Whist—a direct incentive to gambling—is this; whenever any doubt arises, instead of being able to lay their hands upon the recorded decision and settle it at once, the parties concerned first make a bet of one or more sovereigns and then write to the Field. On the ensuing Saturday afternoon a certain amount of money changes hands; two people are wiser, but the increase of wisdom is confined to themselves, and at the very next table the same process is repeated; while numerous quiet, well-meaning [64] people like myself, who never bet, never know anything at all ”

“ Permutations and Combinations will inform us sooner or later—I should imagine later, for to my certain knowledge, a series of four thousand two hundred and nineteen is not [37] enough—as to the number of times we shall make it or lose it, whether we play it, or do not play it; but they will give us no clue as to the extent of damage we may receive when it is played and taken by the third hand, or as to the loss we incur when the ace is in the fourth hand, by importing uncertainty into the game. When we do not put it on and lose it, we may—or may not—lose one trick ”

“ 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. ”

“ The original lead of the longest suit:—This, according to all accounts, is the essence of modern Whist, and if not too much modern it is certainly modern enough; for take any fossil you [21] please, again including Cavendish on Whist,—you must keep in mind the doubtful personality of the three Cavendishes—and you will find no such lead; that it is generally advisable to lead from your strongest suit, a dogma old as the everlasting hills, is quite another matter. ”

“ If the lead always were, it needs no demonstration to prove that the holder of the king has seldom anything to gain by heading the trick; that might be granted without the slightest demur; only how about the combination game? If the fourth player has to play the ace on the queen led, where is the king? certainly, not according to our present knowledge, in the second hand with one or two of the suit. ”

“ Again, Whist is an art; if in any sense a science, it is certainly not an exact science, and the application of algebra to art is somewhat limited. There are far too many unknown quantities in the equation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A player should carefully consider the aspect of the game at the time the discard is made. With no indication to guide him, he may assume his partner’s first discard to be a protective one, if the adversaries have led, or called for trumps; but if, notwithstanding an adverse lead, he can place the command of trumps with his partner, or must so place it in order to save the game, he should assume the reverse. ”

“ They hold that the position of a functionary who takes upon himself to decide important questions of law, and to upset old-established precedents, and manufacture new ones on his mere ipse dixit, should be very clearly defined, and that if one man is to unite in his own proper person the attributes of prophet, priest and king—three single gentlemen rolled into one—he should be duly anointed, consecrated and crowned, ad hoc. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Only we have one, or rather two little difficulties to get over. Does abandoning the hand establish a revoke? and, if it does, is the decision authoritative—that is to say, of compulsory obligation?
Who the original decider was, or who gave him authority to make a penal enactment in the teeth of Laws 58 and 73, I do not know. All I do know is that the decision must not be fathered on Clay, for his case 8, “A has revoked; his claim of the game and throwing down his cards must be held as against himself as an act of playing,” is not on all fours; it occupies much firmer ground. ”

“ He points out that “Mathews recognizes [22] the fact, which we all deplore, that we must in the nature of things, have bad hands or peculiar hands, such that the ordinary lead must be departed from;” that Hoyle, giving directions how to play for an odd trick, says, “Suppose you are elder hand, and that you have ace, king and three small trumps, with four small cards of another suit, three small cards of a third suit, and one small card of a fourth suit, how are you to play? You are to lead the single card.” ”

“ Then, as the evolution proceeds, and we come to (b) , we catch the first glimpse of the woody fibre, “for the sake of a short and easily remembered rule,” it is the fashion to say, “discard originally from your strong suit when the adversaries lead trumps, but this aphorism does not truly express the conditions.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ In taking up the packs, I join the two packs, but leave one card on the table; this card would have been the middle, not the bottom card. I claim a fresh cut; my adversaries claim that it is a misdeal. Am I entitled to a new cut or not?” Answer, No. 1. “We think you cannot make your adversary cut a second time. We do not think that when you left a card on the table it could be said that there was any confusion in the cutting, and unless you can make out that what you did amounted to confusion in the cutting, it is a misdeal.” ”

“ Questions of strict law should never have been submitted to an arbitrator at all; they should have been cleared up long ago by the legislators themselves; though important, they are not very numerous, and as they have been well threshed out, and all their difficulties are known, the entire matter might be completed in a few hours. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That Major A.—whom Clay describes as likely to be very formidable among the best players of the present day—goes so far as to say, “with a bad hand, do not lead from three or four small cards.”
So much for the books! His conclusion from observation is “In watching good players, we find them averse to leading from their long suit unless they have sufficient trumps or other cards of re-entry to enable them to establish that suit. So also with the score advanced; no one dreams of trying to bring in the long suit.” ”

“ An ordinary mind might withstand the philosophy of losing its money on principle; it might resist the blandishments—not to say fallacies in this connection—of the first part of algebra; American leads will never trouble it ”

“ At one time the decider has confined himself to the strictest letter of the law, at another time he has strained it to breaking; sometimes he has read the laws one with another; sometimes he has taken one and left the other out in the cold; sometimes he appears arbitrarily to give his decision out of his own head, quite irrespective of any law whatever ”

“ Whist-players are law-abiding to a degree, and sufferance is the badge of all their tribe; but still they would like to know how the authority obtained what the imperfect Member for Northampton is so fond of calling his mandate ”

“ For twelve years our despot—a despotism worse than Russian, which is tempered by assassination—has had no rival near the throne; for five he has absolutely had nobody even to contradict him, and what is the upshot? ”

“ Moreover, every hand, he will have an entirely different purpose; sometimes to win the game; sometimes to save it, and with that [36] end in view, will lay himself out to make tricks varying from three to eleven—below and above that number, since the invention of short Whist, he has no need to trouble himself—and the moral most people would draw, would be that in that portentous number of hands, some of them would require very different treatment from others ”

“ Objections have repeatedly been taken to these conventions on moral grounds, but as long as the Church and Stage Guild and kindred [30] associations exist, there seems no reason why we should be troubled to look after our own morality. ”