In the same way Brown, Jones and Robinson, collectively or individually, have an undoubted right to depose Clay from his pedestal, and substitute wood as a better material for our idol; but they have no right to palm it off on the worshippers as the real Simon Pure.
I should like an answer to this simple question; if the longest suit is always to be led, how is it that every Whist book, without exception, gives minute directions for leading short suits?
Another red herring trailed across the scent is that a four suit is a normal suit, and that being normal it must always be led. In the first place it is the strong suit, not the long suit, which is the normal lead; in the second place, what is ‘normal’ by no means invariably takes place, otherwise why does ‘abnormal’ still remain in our dictionaries?
When you hold a bad hand, it is just as philosophical to acquaint your partner with that unpleasant circumstance by leading a strengthening card, as it is to lead a long weak suit and leave him floundering about in ignorance of everything but its length, and it has a much greater weight of authority at the back of it.
Pondering where the Dioscuri got hold of such extraordinary notions, it flashed across my memory that in childhood’s happy hour, I had read in Lemprière, that though they spent half their time with the immortals, they passed the remainder “in another place;” hence these tears!
WOODEN ARRANGEMENT, NO. 4.
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.”