Ruff a winning card of the adversaries! What possible benefit can you derive from allowing your opponent to discard, and by that discard show his partner the suit he wishes led? If you are too stingy to use a high trump, surely you might play a little one just to keep the trick going. “It is much better to play a small trump with the certainty it will be overtrumped than to let the trick go.”—Westminster Papers.
When your partner has opened a suit with the ace, and on the third round eleven are out, he holds the other two, and whenever he leads one of them—whether it is the queen or the four—it is a winning card; but if you fail to grasp this, and feel disposed to play the thirteenth trump on it, don’t waste time either in invoking the immortal gods, inspecting the last trick, or looking præternaturally intelligent—trump it at once, and put him out of his misery. The idea is not new, for it occurred to Macbeth when about to perpetrate the very same coup:
“If ’twere done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly.”
My only claim is to have expressed myself without such an involved use of auxiliary verbs.
If you have more than two of the suit, don’t play the ace on your partner’s knave; it may be a short suit, or the head of a sequence, and you throw away the power of passing the ten second round, even if it is from king, queen, knave to five, there is nothing to be gained by covering; with ace and another win the trick and return it at once, unless you lead trumps.
Though frequently done, it is not good whist to decline to win a trick, either on the ground that you want a guard for your king of trumps, or because you hold six. In the other game both these proceedings would be correct.
Fourth hand.—Win the trick, and endeavour, if possible, to do so without playing a false card. Like all things that are difficult at first, you will find it become comparatively easy by practice. You might suppose that the exponent of bumblepuppy—who always considers a trick of his own making worth at least two made by his partner—would get into no difficulty here; but he does. He has a firmly-rooted belief that his strong suits are under the protection of a special Providence which will never allow them to be ruffed, and uttering his wretched shibboleth, “Part with my ace, sir? never!” he contrives to lose any number of tricks by keeping up his winning cards to the last possible moment and a shade longer. I imagine he is under the erroneous impression that this in some way compensates for cutting in with a small trump when he is not wanted.
“It is a good plan when you have the thirteenth trump to pass winning cards. The reason of this is not apparent, but in practice I know several players who do so, and in the multitude of counsellors there is wisdom.”—Westminster Papers.
