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 Iam 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, bedeprived 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.”
Objections have repeatedly been taken to these conventions on moral grounds, but as long as the Church and Stage Guild and kindredassociations exist, there seems no reason why we should be troubled to look after our own morality.
For my own part, although believing the principle to be extremely doubtful and the extension far from clear, I am quite prepared to admit that when you have a reasonable expectation of bringing in a five suit, it is desirable that you should make your partner acquainted with the exact length of it, but I am equally prepared to deny its expediency when there is no chance of bringing it in; if such a suit must be played, and you may be so unfortunately placed that it is unavoidable, it would be much better to keep the length of it buried in your own bosom.
Oddly enough when another writer, emulous of extending the master, and seduced by the analogy that what was sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander, suggested that if it was imperative to lead the lowest but one of five, itmust be equally obligatory to lead the lowest but two of six; (indeed so clear is this next link in the chain, that it was the very first thought of myself and some half-dozen other light-minded persons, the moment we heard of the principle; but, by ill luck, the seed fell on barren ground, for so far were we from realizing the importance of our discovery, and taking immediate steps to protect the patent, that, sad to relate,solvuntur tabulæ risu), we find Cavendish inThe Fieldfor a time deprecating such an eminently logical extension, till I wake up one Saturday morning and read that the antepenultimate does not go far enough, and that under pain of becoming fossils, we must all lead the lowest but three of seven, but four of eight, and so on until we arrive at the lowest but nine of thirteen, when further extension in that direction becomes impracticable.
Fortunately this arrangement has been simplified, for the game would have become evenslower than it is, if whenever a player had a ten suit, he had to repeat to himself, lowest but one of five, two of six, three of seven, till he eventually arrived at lowest but six of ten, and after much laborious whittling at the small end of nothing, the ultimate outcome is, with any number of a suit from five to thirteen, to lead the top but three.
Apropos of this same ultimate outcome, in the Westminster Papers for January, 1875, there is a remarkable statement: “We have the opinion, never published, of a personal friend, that while you ought to lead the lowest card in four suits, you should leadthe third from the topin five suits;” and this anonymous genius is still “unwept, unhonoured and unsung.” Such is fame!