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The Decline and Fall of Whist: An Old Fashioned View of New Fangled Play cover

The Decline and Fall of Whist: An Old Fashioned View of New Fangled Play

Chapter 7: THE MODERN GAME.
By John Petch Hewby
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About This Book

A witty, opinionated examination of the changing game of whist, arguing that modern conventions and rigid rules have displaced earlier judgment and skill. The author traces the game's rise and decline, lampooning innovations such as signal systems like the peter and echo, artificial discard rules, particular leads, and other prescriptive devices, and analyzes how these affect play. Interleaved are illustrative hands, mathematical asides, and practical advice defending older principles of card play. The work combines satire and technical commentary to advocate a return to flexible, reasoned play rather than mechanical conventions.

THE MODERN GAME.

Because a game has been overlaid by petty detail, and injured by having its square pegs driven into round holes, it does not on that account become a modern game, any more than the Trojan priest, when the serpents set upon him and strangled him, became a modern Laocoon. First, this figment of a modern game is devised, and then used as a convenient peg to hang other figments upon.

Whist, as far as I have been able to ascertain from a tolerably careful study of the leading authorities, “has slowly broadened down from precedent to precedent;” there has been no solution of continuity; and other investigators hold the same belief. “We suspect that Cavendish very often objected to that ancient plagiarist Mathews for stealing his ideas.” “In the bulk the two systems agree.”—Westminster Papers.

“There is no essential difference between modern and old-fashioned Whist, i.e., between Hoyle and Cavendish, Mathews and J. C.”—Mogul.

So “the modern game” would appear to be an imaginary line, on one side of which stand all the authorities from Hoyle to Clay, including Cavendish on Whist;—recently designated fossils—on the other, “the great twin brethren,” Cavendish in The Field and the ‘Theory of Whist.’