A little over forty years ago, when I was working on the Stanley Collins booklet that Dick Buffum published, I was in correspondence with Bertie White, who was one of Collins’s pupils. Bertie was very kind and sent me a few items, including a little notebook of his, which I gather dates from the early 1930s, since one of the pages bears a date in 1933. I was looking it over earlier tonight, and I noticed something that initially didn’t really make sense to me. I thought I would mention it here, mainly to record it for posterity.
Most of the material in the notebook is in Bertie’s handwriting, but some of it is in Collins’s. For example, one page is headed “Four Aces.” It has fourteen lines in Collins’s handwriting, and ends with “S.C. 4 Ace Trick.” Anyway, what I wanted to mention was the following. In Collins’s handwriting, this is stated:
Card order
Clubs Spades Hearts Diamonds
Ace, 4, 7, 10, K, 3, 6, 9, Q, 2, 5
I separated the values with commas, though Collins may have used periods, or in a few cases nothing. It can be seen that two values (8 and J) are not shown.
After pondering this for a while, I saw that the sequence seems to have gaps of two values between each stated value. So, placing the omitted values in brackets, you arrive at this (I think):
Ace [2, 3] 4 [5, 6] 7 [8, 9] 10 [J, Q] K [Ace, 2] 3 [4, 5] 6 [7, 8] 9 [10, J] Q [K, Ace] 2 [3, 4] 5
And, of course, the order of suits seems unusual (to me).
Maybe this is all “old hat” to those in the know. Maybe this was for a specific trick, though it does not appear in that context in Bertie’s notebook.
—Tom Sawyer