These two kinds of discards are, or ought to be, of importance to three very different classes of players:—
(1) The Scientific.
(2) The Commonly Decent.
(3) The Exponents of Bumblepuppy.
(1) The Scientific.—Here, with trumps declared against you, you discard, as already said, from your best guarded suit. Your partner knows this is probable, but he does not know how strong you are in that suit; he also knows it may very possibly be a suit in which you hold three small cards, and a second discard of it only gives him the further information that you had either three or five—he must infer which from his own hand—he assumes you did not originally hold two, for you would not have left yourself entirely bare of the suit. It is not everybody who is in the proud position which I once occupied, when a trump being led by the adversary, I found myself with no trump, the best nine cards of one suit, and two other aces.
Among good players, then, the forced discard amounts to this: that though you are aware your partner is discarding with the best possible motives, and he is aware that you are doing the same, neither can depend upon the other’s discard as showing anything for certain. With trumps declared against you, you must place unknown cards to the best of your ability, and in such an unpleasant conjuncture, if you are exceptionally fortunate, you may sometimes save the game, and the skill displayed in doing so may be a joy for ever:—
“Forsan et hæc olim meminisse juvabit.”
Observe the discretion of the poet in his choice of the word “forsan.”
But when, on the other hand, you look at the improbability of this coming off, when you reflect that your partner has occasionally given you two discards, and that you, in the exercise of that right of private judgment inherent in every Protestant, led one of those very suits, and by so doing lost the game; when you recall what then took place, the epea pteroenta, the mutual—but the subject is too painful; let us leave it, and pass on to Class 2.[20] This class has two divisions, they both see your discards, but—without any reference to their own hands or anything that has been played—one division assumes your discard is invariably from weakness, and at once knocks on the head the very suit you have sedulously been attempting to guard; the other has got hold of the pernicious axiom that the original discard is necessarily your strongest suit, and always leads that.