Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Two Systems. There are two roads to success in the long- suit game, but which is the better it is impossible, in the light of our present experience, to say. The more common road, and the one that has been traveled ever since whist was a game, is to establish the suit first, leaving the exhaustion of the trumps to a later period in the hand. The other road, which was first suggested in the New York Sun, Jan. 17, 1897, and which was traveled with remarkable success by some of the players at the seventh congress, is to exhaust the trumps first, leaving the establishment of the suit to a later period of the hand. The objections to the first system are : that it shows the adversaries which suit to protect, warns them to make their trumps separately, and leads them to force out your cards of reentry. The objections to the second system are: that it prevents the adversaries from exhausting the trumps when they are stronger in them than you are, and leaves your partner in doubt as to the suit for which you are playing. It also has an unfortunate tendency to induce a player to lead trumps from hands which are not strong enough to justify it.On the other hand, it is claimed that these disadvantages are frequently compensated for by inducing the adversaries to run for it with the high cards of your long suit, thereby establishing it for you, and by allowing you and your partner to make your small trumps separately in hands in which the adversaries would have drawn the trumps but for your leading them originally. The first of these systems is called the long- suit game, because it always starts by showing or establishing the long suit. The second is the top-of-nothing game, so called because if the trumps are not led originally, the success of the long suit not being reasonably ...