[1] “That there are a large number of players who think they play Whist, and yet do not reason, is too true, but such play may be Bumblepuppy, or some other game; it certainly is not Whist.”—Westminster Papers.

Bumblepuppy is persisting to play Whist, either in utter ignorance of all its known principles, or in defiance of them, or both.

Hudibras has given another definition—

“Bumblepuppy was played in low public houses.”

“Here and there were Bumblepuppy grounds, a game in which the players rolled iron balls into holes marked with numbers.”—Chronicles of Newgate.

From which I infer that in the good old times this game first drove its votaries to drinking, and then landed them in a felon’s cell.

[2] In all well regulated society, your aim should be the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and that number is notoriously number one.

[3] “Do not attempt to practise until you have acquired a competent knowledge of the theory.”—Mathews, A.D. 1800.

[4] “The first Whist lesson should be to keep your eye on the table and not on your own cards.”

“We cannot all have genius, but we can all have attention; the absence of intelligence we cannot help, inattention is unpardonable.”—Westminster Papers.

[5] Since these words were written the “Westminster Papers” is no more.

[6] “It is highly necessary to be correct in leads.” “Never lead a card without a reason, though a wrong one.” “Be particularly cautious not to deceive your partner in his or your own leads.”—Mathews.

[7] “According to the play that we see, with great weakness the rule is rather to lead strengthening cards. For our own part we should be inclined to say, “Lead from your long suit only when you are sufficiently strong to bring in that suit with the aid of reasonable strength on the part of your partner.”—Westminster Papers.

“When you have a moderate hand yourself sacrifice it to your partner.”—Mathews.

“With a bad hand lead that suit which is least likely to injure your partner. Do not, therefore, lead from four or five small cards.”—Major A.

“A lead from a queen or knave and one small card is not objectionable if you have a miserably weak hand; your queen or knave may be valuable to your partner.”—Clay.

“The rule of always leading from the longest, as distinct from the strongest suit, is a rule which, more frequently than any other, sacrifices a partner’s cards without any benefit to the leader, and is in direct opposition to the true principles of combination.”—Mogul.

Even Cavendish, unless “generally” is synonymous with “always,” admits the expediency of occasionally leading a short suit; “the hand, however weak, must hold one suit of four cards, and this should generally be chosen.”

[8] “The lead is quite exceptional, and many good judges have doubted whether a small one should not be led.”—The Field.

[9] As intelligent children you will, perhaps, be tempted to observe that all this is so self-evident it is scarcely worth mentioning: at your immature time of life such a mistake is pardonable, but as you grow older you will find that a determination to open ragged suits in season and out of season—especially out—is one of the strongest impulses of our imperfect nature.

[10] As defined by Captain Corcoran, R.N. In all treatises on Whist “never” is invariably used in this sense. Perhaps in presence of the New Whist which is now raging violently in America, it would be more correct here to substitute “was” for “is.”

[11] Peccavi! the lead is given in What to Lead, by Cam.

[12] Never give “the general” an opportunity for thinking if you can avoid it; this is a rule of universal application. “How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done!”

[13] It was introduced as “a proposed extension of principle,” but you had better stick to the old adage, “first catch your principle,” and leave the extension of it to some future time. Theoretical advantages of this lead, and also the echo of the signal, you will find fully set forth in “Cavendish.” In a letter to the Field, September 27th, 1879, he appears to advocate varying its monotony by occasionally leading the lowest but two. Cam, the original patentee of this invention, and one of the finest players of his day, directs you to lead the lowest but one only when you hold no honour in the suit. By this plan you can not only count your partner’s hand—the apparent end of most modern Whist—but after you have made the queen and lost your king on the return, you have the additional gratification of knowing to a certainty that he does not even hold the knave.

With regard to the echo, I have no head for intricate mathematical calculations, and therefore am unable to tell you at about what trick everything would be ready, but speaking roughly, I should be afraid that for all practical purposes the hand would occasionally be over before the signaller and the echoer had completed their operations. In the “Art of Practical Whist” you are recommended to lead the lowest but two of six. (The advice of Punch to those about to marry is applicable here.)

Mr. F. H. Lewis, in the Field, January, 1880, has propounded a scheme for sub-dividing the echo into categories, and it has recently been pointed out to me that by leading trumps in some irregular way—understood, I presume, by the inventor of the process—you can explain to your partner that you originally held four. “Is there anything whereof it may be said, see, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.” When all these improvements are in use, this is clear, the elect will return to that fine old practice known as “piping at whisk”; the rest of us to primÆval chaos.

[14] “These refinements of artifice are utterly opposed to the essence of scientific Whist.”—Westminster Papers.

[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—

[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.

[23] “The strong hand is leading trumps, and he gets them all out, and has the lead; nine times out of ten he will have forgotten his partner’s first discard, and play on the assumption his last discard is his first, and so certain is this to come about that, we believe, with some players, it is best to endeavour to calculate how many discards we shall get, and let the last discard be our weakest suit.”—Westminster Papers.

[24] If they were slightly to vary this statement, and say, “They pitched thirteen cards about only for their own amusement,” the position would be much more inexpugnable.

Unless my memory deceives me, in “The Whist Player,” by Col. Blyth, they are recommended to confine themselves to playing “Beggar my Neighbour” with their grandmothers;—as most of those ladies must in the ordinary course of nature have gone over to the majority, this would be hard on them—but they might adopt a middle course, and play that fascinating game with each other; they could pitch the cards about equally well, and would have more cards to pitch. I shall resume this topic at the close of this lecture.

[25] Will he?

And you can hope anything you like, if you don’t mind the subsequent disappointment: First, he has to see it, and after you have got over that difficulty, if he only holds two small cards in that suit, and has a tenace in the other—according to my experience—he will lead his own. With king singly guarded in your suit, instead of being delighted to play it, wild horses are powerless to drag it from him.

[26] Absorbed in their discoveries, they appear to have forgotten that, “Vixerunt fortes ante Agamemnona.”

“If weak in trumps, keep guard on your adversary’s suits. If strong, throw away from them.”—Mathews.

[27] That young and curly period when I was influenced by the fashions has passed away. Eheu fugaces, etc. It may be easier to remember “strong” than “best protected”; one epithet is certainly three syllables shorter than the other, but it seems a pity, for the sake of those three syllables, to use an expression which is utterly misleading.

In “The Art of Practical Whist” also “strongest” is used without any qualification whatever, and here you only save two syllables; although the Commination Service is seldom read now—even if, like Royal Oak Day and Herr Von Joel, it should cease altogether to be retained by the Establishment—to make the blind man go out of his way would still be inexpedient, unless you make him go out of your own way as well, for you may cut him for a partner; if you have no respect for the blind, surely you have some regard for your pocket-money.

[28] This is one of the numerous points where the new man and the man of the stone age—now politely termed “fossil”—come into collision. “We do not think that a hard and fast rule, (the italics are mine) such as you propose, can be laid down.” Even if it were a hard and fast rule—which it is pre-eminently not—his objecting to it on that ground would be most inconsistent—

[29] “About as remarkable as the rule that if you want to ascertain how much you have spent out of a shilling, you must subtract the number of pence left from twelve.

“If the court cards and the ace of a suit are pipped according to their values, the knave would be eleven, the queen twelve, the king thirteen, and the ace fourteen; and everybody would see that the difference between the pips on any card and fourteen would show the number of cards in the suit of higher value than the card in question.

“Thus, there are nine higher than the five, and seven higher than the seven.

“They would see, also, that if they could place three, and three only, of those cards in any one player’s hand—as can be done when the fourth best is led—the number of higher cards not in his hand would be fourteen, less three, that is eleven less the pips.”—Mogul.

[30] The origin of the signal is as clear as mud, and the very name of the inventor of the well-known dodge of playing an unnecessarily high card to induce the opponents to lead him a trump, is lost in the mists of antiquity.

[31] People do not seem at all agreed what a convention is. I used to be under the impression myself that it was an assembly of notables—a sort of liberal four hundred, or what is called in America a caucus. It is described by Childe Harold as a dwarfish demon that foiled the knights in Marialva’s dome, while I find in the Fortnightly Review, April, 1879, “Conventions are certain modes of play established by preconcerted arrangement;” by whom established, preconcerted, or arranged is not mentioned; and I am very much afraid that this definition leaves a loop-hole for winking at your partner when you want trumps led—of course “by preconcerted arrangement”—otherwise it would be unfair and (as he might mistake it for a nervous affection of the eyelid) absurd. At Whist you can call anybody or anything whatever you please; I have been told, but I scarcely believe it, that you can call the knave of hearts “Jakovarts.” Poets (also an irritable race) have the same licence, and for general purposes, according to Mr. Squeers, there is no Act of Parliament against your calling a house an island; but when you come to definitions, you must be more particular, or you will land in a hole.

[32] It is only right that I should state here that these are not modern opinions, they are the opinions of Clay, and I am informed he is rapidly becoming obsolete. This may be the case. I know the practice of numbers who call themselves Whist-players is entirely opposed to his theory; still, though I don’t like to prophesy (having a high respect for the proverb that it is dangerous to do so, unless you know), I am open to make a small bet that the Peter will be obsolete first.

[33] I have seen a player signal twice consecutively, and lose a treble each hand.

With the score three all, I have seen the original leader, holding ace, knave, nine, to five trumps, and the ten turned up—play a singleton, knock his partner’s king on the head, and then begin to signal, while the adversaries were making the next two tricks in that very suit: his partner ruffed the fourth, and with king and queen of the two unopened suits, led the queen of trumps, killed the king in the second hand, and the signaller then proceeded to wait about, and with all the remaining trumps on his right, eventually lost three by cards.

I have seen another player of many years’ standing first lead a plain suit and then call; his partner echoed it, and they lost four by cards, and I have been told that some time after a table had broken up, and three of the party had left the house, one of the club servants, entering the card-room, found the fourth still sitting at the table, and continuing to signal.

[34] “Signalling has placed a dangerous weapon in the hands of an injudicious player. Weak players avoid leading a trump, watching for some invitation from their partner. Weaker players still are constantly examining the tricks; and finding in the position of the cards, accidentally disarranged in turning, an indication of a call, lead trumps, perhaps to the ruin of the game.”—Mr. F. H. Lewis.

“We do not know whether anyone has ever kept a record of the number of tricks lost by Petering. During the past year in the Whist we have witnessed we feel confident that more tricks have been lost than won by this practice.”—Westminster Papers.

After many years’ further experience I am quite of the same opinion.

[35] “They are looking for Peters and the lowest but one, but they never think of the real points of the game.”

“They are always on the look out for it, and they spend more time and trouble about the signal than about all the rest of the play.”—Westminster Papers.

[36] Even in board schools forcing the strong hand is a part of the ordinary curriculum.

There used to be some difficulty in ascertaining which was the strong trump hand, but the signal has done away with that.

[37] “Many times this kind of signal comes after the player has had the lead, and when nothing of importance, speaking from our own knowledge, has taken place to justify a signal. We are very careless about leading trumps when our partner has had the chance and did not lead them.”

“It is a sign of weak play if you first lead out your winning cards, and then lead trumps; it shows ignorance of the principles of the game. If it was advisable to lead trumps at all, it should be done before you led out your winning cards.”—Westminster Papers.

These are noble sentiments! how any sane human being can imagine he has the right to tell me to destroy my hand and do for him—after he has drawn his own teeth—what he was afraid—before that operation—to do for himself, I have never been able to understand.

[38] “When it is evident the winning cards are betwixt you and your adversaries, play an obscure game; but as clear a one as possible if your partner has a good hand.”—Mathews.

[39] The defence is quite as singular as the attack; for instance, if you should be taken to task for any alleged criminality arising from defective vision; instead of making either of the obvious answers that it never took place at all, or that you regret it escaped your notice and will endeavour to keep a better look out in future, the ordinary plea in extenuation is “the noise in the room,” also “because your cards are so bad,” is often assigned as a satisfactory reason.

[40] Even a few days of this discipline at the beginning of Lent would be better than nothing.

[41] Evasive answers are of two kinds; those

(1) For the ordinary platitude, for which you will find good examples in Card Table Talk.

(2) For the blatant absurdity; these are more difficult, for while modestly asserting your own individuality, you must at the same time guard against

The following remark admirably fulfils both these conditions:—

“For the matter of that,” said Colonel Quagg, “Rot!”—Sala.

It should be addressed, kindly but firmly, to a point about eighteen inches above your partner’s head.

[42] A well-known whist-player who is really deaf is reported to aver that he never knew what comfort was till that misfortune befell him.

[43] Bad play is any kind of solecism perpetrated by somebody else; if by yourself, it may be either just your luck, pardonable inattention, playing too quickly, drawing the wrong card, or—in a very extreme case—carelessness, but it is never bad play; sometimes the difference is even greater than this, and what would be bad play in another, in yourself may be the acme of skill.

[44] To the sneer that I lose now because I play worse, I reply it is quite possible I do not play so well as I did five years ago, I make the sneerer a present of the admission, but I play better than I did twenty years ago, when—playing against as good players as I do now—if I did not win every time I sat down I was astonished.

[45] “An experiment that does not go on to millions is very little use in determining such propositions. It can be demonstrated to the satisfaction of everyone that the odds, after having won the first game in a rubber, in favour of winning one of the next two games is three to one. Yet Mr. Clay considered that five to two was a bad bet, and we have lost not only at five to two but at two to one, and on one occasion we actually lost the long odds in two hundred bets, a hundred and three times, so that if we were to take this result as of any value, the odds would be slightly in favour of losing a rubber when you had won the first game, which is absurd.”—Westminster Papers.

[46] Not a fine whist-player, for this is a rare bird, much more rare than a black swan (these can be bought any day at Jamrach’s by the couple, but even in the present hard times when, I am informed, the markets are glutted with everything, he has not one fine whist-player in stock); essential to him, in addition to common sense and attention, are genius and a thorough knowledge of Cavendish.

[47] “Although these maxims may occasionally speak of things never to be done, and others always to be done, you must remember that no rules are without exception, and few more open to exceptional cases than rules for whist.”—Clay.

[48] Just as orthodoxy has been defined to be your own doxy, so “the Game” usually means “your own idea of the game at the time.”

I have called it Protean because it assumes so many different forms (being mainly based on results), and like the nigger’s little pig—runs about to such an extent that it is impossible to get a clear view of it.

[49] Though whist is reported to be an old English word meaning silence, and though it is advisable for many reasons that it should be played with reasonable quiet, it is not at all compulsory to conduct yourself as if in the monastery of La Trappe; you have a perfect right—as far as the laws of whist are concerned—to discuss at any time the price of stocks, the latest scandal, or even the play going on, “provided that no intimation whatever, by word or gesture, be given as to the state of your own hand or the game.”—Etiquette of Whist.

At bumblepuppy you had better waive this right altogether, for if under any circumstances you open your mouth, you will infallibly put your foot into it. Even here, the bumblepuppist is not consistent, for while constantly laying down the extraordinary law—in a very loud voice—that whist is silence, he considers the carrying out of that law much more incumbent on the rest of the table than himself.

[50] “Avoid playing with those who instruct, or rather find fault while the hand is playing. They are generally unqualified by ignorance, and judge from consequences; but if not, advice while playing does more harm than good.”—Mathews.

“The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.”—Shakespeare.

“Talking over the hand after it has been played is not uncommonly called a bad habit and an annoyance, I am firmly persuaded it is one of the readiest ways of learning whist.”—Clay.

[51]

“The education of the whist-player is peculiar. How he becomes a whist-player nobody knows. He never learns his alphabet or the catechism or anything that he ought to do. He appears full-grown, mushroom-like. He remembers someone blowing him up for doing something he ought not to have done, and somebody else blowing him up for doing something else, and he is blown up to the end of the chapter. This phase of being blown up is varied by grumbling sometimes aloud, sometimes sotto voce; so that the whist-player is reared on scolding and grumbling as other youngsters are reared on pap. Truly this is a happy life. Some men grumble on principle because it is a national privilege, and they avail themselves of the Englishman’s birthright.”

“Some do it because they believe that if they grumble enough, it will bring them luck. Some do it in the hope that they will excite sympathy, and that their friends will feel for their ill-fortune, which, by-the-bye, whist-players never do. Some grumble to annoy their friends, and we are bound to say these succeed.”—Westminster Papers.

[52] “They are intent on some wretched crotchet like the lowest but one.”

“Every time he can lead a lowest but one, no matter what the state of the game or the score, that lead he is sure to make, and we believe there are some neophytes who would lose their money with pleasure if they could only tell their partners afterwards that they had led the lowest but one.”—Westminster Papers.

[53] “Common sense (which in truth is very uncommon) is the best sense I know of. Abide by it; it will counsel you best.”—Chesterfield Letters.

[54] This is at first sight a rather appalling proposition, but the advice I give you I have always endeavoured to follow myself, and I am not a solitary case, for in the Nineteenth Century Review for May, 1879, I find the writer of one of the articles is in the same boat; this thoughtful writer—he must have been thoughtful, otherwise his lucubration would not have been accepted—says: “I have given up the practice of thinking, or it may be I never had it.”

[55] Making passes in the air with your hand, as if you were about to mesmerise the table, is another favourite stratagem.

[56] The difference here is more apparent than real; Mathews, with considerable limitations, advocates leading singletons; now-a-days the practice is decried, but I regret to say that as far as my experience goes, the principal obstacle to leading a singleton is not having a singleton to lead.

[57] “We expect that Cavendish very often must have objected to that ancient plagiarist Mathews for stealing his ideas.”

“If their ideas are not identical, it is rather difficult to find where one begins and the other ends.”—Westminster Papers.

“I contend that there is no essential difference between modern and old-fashioned whist, i.e., between Hoyle and Cavendish, Mathews and J. C.”—Mogul.

[58] “The game is not the simple straightforward game it was, it is more erratic and more difficult.”

“Whist is more and more, and year by year, a game of brag, a game for gambling, a game in which we have to study the idiosyncrasies of the players as well as the cards themselves. We have to deduce from imperfect data, and when our inference is wrong we have a great chance of a scolding from an infuriated partner.”

“Modern whist in a nutshell—signs and signals and a short supply of brains.”—Westminster Papers.

“We are by no means peculiar in the opinion that signals and the so-called developments are destroying whist.”—Cornhill Magazine.

“Whist, as a game, is in a fair way of being ruined.”—Knowledge.

[59] “Let players, if they wish to play a decent game, and avoid a mischievous and annoying practice, give up the privilege accorded by Law 91.”—Home Whist.

[60] “This refuge against boredom has fallen through. Seeing an article on suspended animation in the Contemporary Review for November 1879, I pounced upon it, thinking it might contain the recipe, and found to my disgust that the process, so circumstantially narrated, was a hoax.”

[61] “While practising these virtues you are not obliged to look pleasant unless you feel so—this would be dissimulation. Heine’s plan fulfils all reasonable requirements.

[62] He is right to some extent; the domestic rubber always closes early.