[15] “What with the if’s and the mystification that would occur from playing the cards in this erratic manner, we should do more to injure than improve the play in the present state of Whist science.”—Westminster Papers. [The italics are mine.]
[16] “It puzzleth and perplexeth the conceits of many that perhaps would otherwise co-operate with him, and makes a man walk almost alone to his own ends.”—Bacon.
[17] I have worked it out myself in more than four thousand cases by rule of thumb (Field, October 1882), and obtained the same result; if in the teeth of this, early in the hand, a decent Whist-player plays the king second on a small card led, it is an unnecessarily high card; and as unnecessarily high cards are not played without an object, that object is presumably a call for trumps.
[18] “With ace, queen, etc., of a suit of which your right hand adversary leads the knave, put on the ace invariably. No good player, with king, knave, ten, will begin with the knave: of course, it is finessing against yourself to put on the queen, and, as the king is certainly behind you, you give away at least the lead, without any possible advantage.”—Mathews. This advice as a rule is sound, but you must bear in mind that towards the end of a hand the knave is often led from king, knave, ten, or king, knave alone, and if you, holding ace, queen, are obliged to make two tricks in the suit, in order to win, or save the game, you will have to play the queen. If the king is held by your left-hand adversary, you will lose the game whatever you play. When you play the queen under these circumstances, and it comes off, don’t imagine that you are inspired, or præternaturally intelligent; you are only playing to the score; and you will find that most instances of irregular play, which at first sight suggest inspiration, resolve themselves into this.
[19] In ordinary discarding, your strong suit is your long suit: except to deceive your partner, and get your king prematurely cut off, it can be no use to discard from four or five small cards in one suit, in order to keep king to three in another.
[20] If there are a “few words” going about, and you are not concerned, don’t put your oar in—
“They who in quarrels interpose,
Must often wipe a bloody nose.”
[21] Genius has been defined to be “an unlimited capacity for taking pains,” and the pains they will take to circumvent you are assuredly unlimited, but their capacity for anything is so doubtful, that their claim to genius on this score must be left in abeyance.
[22] The excitement of the moment has led me into exaggeration here; let me give the bumblepuppist his due, the exact number is ten, as you will find later on.