PILLAR NO. 2.—ILLUSTRATIVE WHIST-HANDS.
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.