PILLAR NO. 1.—THE PHILOSOPHY OF WHIST.
In case the ipse dixit of Cavendish in The Field, or “the preface,” should fail to convince, we have also had the sacred name of Philosophy dragged in to countenance these proceedings.
Ever since there has been any record of philosophers, their schools appear to have been about as numerous as themselves. Plato for his own share had five different sets of followers. All the systems contradicted each other, and the disciples of each master usually held different views as to his tenets; as this has continued down to our own day, for the dogmatic philosopher who recently died in Chelsea spent more than half a century in contradicting himself, while two of the most prominent disciples of Comte are fighting tooth and nail at this very moment, when we hear of the philosophy of Whist, the enquiry naturally arises, which philosophy? 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. (Here I may remark, in a parenthesis, that though the late Mr. Clay eventually gave a qualified assent to the penultimate lead and the forced discard, it has yet to be shown that he assented to either the one or the other, in its present uncompromising and preposterous form, a form which is utterly repugnant to his every public utterance).
This is considerably opposed to the fearful and wonderful philosophy of Dr. Pole, the basis of which appears to be that it is always imperative to lead your longest suit, which he naively admits to be a losing game. It is unfortunate that his lines are drawn in a commercial age, for if he had only lived in the time of Don Quixote he might have taken high rank.
To ignore the teaching of a long line of illustrious dead, to set precedent at defiance, and deliberately to go out of your way in order to lose, is an extension of the old stoical principle, “under all circumstances to keep your temper,” in the very best latter-day manner; but reasonably doubtful as to the success of such an appeal if left to stand upon its own bottom, he invokes elementary algebra to his aid. Now elementary algebra is not devoid of good points; by its means we learn that a man may—either in time or in eternity—hold 635,013,559,600 different whist-hands. Moreover, every hand, he will have an entirely different purpose; sometimes to win the game; sometimes to save it, and with that 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; the philosopher of Whist, however, thinks not, but would fit all those six hundred and thirty-five thousand odd millions of hands into the same Procrustes’ bed, and would always lead the longest 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.
Take our old friend king and another in the second hand; 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 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; when we put it on and lose it, we may lose any number. The whole system of the newly suggested play of the first and second hand is undermined by the fundamentally false assumption that the lead is always from a long suit; that everybody, irrespective of the score, has merely to ascertain which is his longest suit, and then to take immediate steps to put the table in possession of its exact length is so transparently simple, that such extreme simplicity in a game of skill is enough of itself to arouse the gravest suspicion.
Qui studet optatam cursu contingere metam,
Multa tulit fecitque puer, sudavit et alsit.
Just to see how the plan worked, six consecutive times have I with king and two others—using my best judgment as to the lead—passed the queen led, and six times have I lost a trick; this may show that my judgment was bad; but it shows, with much more absolute certainty, that the lead, in those six cases, was not from numerical strength.
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.
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 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; the coup succeeds, simply and solely, because, by a most improbable chance, the fourth hand holds one, while the second player holds two of the suit. Genuine, unadulterated bumble-puppy! Whenever I am induced to propound a system of Whist philosophy, enlivened with texts from the Gospel according to Cocker (absit omen), its fundamental principle will be that four in thirteen goes twice.
If I with king and another head the queen and make it, and have nothing else to do, I can return the suit, ruff the third round and make three consecutive tricks; not a bad thing in these hard times when the rental of our estates is constantly diminishing, and the income tax has gone up another penny.
Now suppose I pass it and my partner makes the ace, he must open a new suit. We have had a surfeit of statistics lately, still, if the gentleman at present in possession of the calculating machine of the late Mr. Babbage would kindly turn the handle, and let me know how many tricks on the average are lost by merely opening a suit, I should be much obliged to him. When the leader and his partner either hold the whole of it, or nothing at all, it may be done with impunity, but under ordinary circumstances it usually entails a loss of one trick and often two.
I have considered at some length the original lead of the longest suit, and the lead of the penultimate, because on these two commandments hang all the latter-day law, but not the profits: for on the strength—for want of a more appropriate word—of these figments, at this very moment our guide is attacking the recognised play of the third hand, our philosopher is suggesting an entirely new set of proceedings for the second hand, while both guide and philosopher are doing their level best to assist our friend in New York to bouleverse the leads.