The art is in the execution. Three or four players are optimal, but in a pinch, two are sufficient to perpetrate the game. The key here, as in so many things, is to play swiftly and assuredly, for expertise is its own enchantment and disguise. Cards should be snapped confidently down and winning tricks, finesses, and all other methods of swelling the progress announced with appropriate emphasis. As the players act and react, weigh and inveigle, they must remember that they are scheming centrifugally, that their apparent competition with one another is in fact a tacit collaboration. In other words, the players are engaged in a consensual ruse. They are playing to the house.

This is TEGWAR, The Exciting Game Without Any Rules. In truth, it is not so much a game as a staged performance, whose fantastical strategies are only show and whose complex flourishes matter only insofar as they inspire bystanders to try to comprehend and, later, to participate. For it is one of humanity's irrepressible tendencies to compel a chaos to come to order. Since none of us can bear a wilderness for long, we assume an etiology. Which is what stalwart TEGWARRIORS rely on.

TEGWAR requires that its players heed Jimmy Cagney's warning about acting: "Don't get caught at it." Unless every seam of your sham stays sealed, even the most gullible will hang back. (In sports, they call this "selling the fake." The halfback charges hardest into the line when he doesn't have the ball, while the quarterback steals around the end for six. With a hard jab step or a series of epileptic feints, the basketball player sheds his defender and opens a path to the hoop.) Emily Dickinson, that most estimable hustler, summed up the method rather neatly: "Success in circuit lies." Nevertheless, if the game must not be too obvious, neither should it be too obscure. Like those dreamy nymphs who bathe away eternity, the players want to seduce and elude at the same time.

Properly primed, the pigeons will be mesmerized by the crusts that fall nearby. They'll see a club trump a heart or a pair of twos earn an extra turn; they'll note the surrender of everyone else's aces to the player who flashes the first black queen; with fascination they'll watch the strange, random mutations of the game, trying to grab a handle, or at least figure out where the handles are located. Admittedly, many witnesses, unable to grasp the calibrated excesses on display or follow the phony reasoning behind any lead, may recall their Thomas DeQuincey, who in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater predicted their confusion: "In parts and fractions eternal creations are carried on, but the nexus is wanting, and life and the central principles which should bind together all the parts at the center with all its radiations to the circumference, are wanting." Absent enlightenment, they will stay intrigued only so long.

But there may be one, the one who has been steadily edging in from the periphery, who thinks he might be getting the hang of it (so eager are we to believe that there is a hang to be gotten). That's the guy who will be invited to sit in. He'll even begin to win a bit, hardly sensing why. He'll be congratulated on being such a quick study. He'll be encouraged to play for higher stakes. And as soon as he gets sucked into a sizeable pot, the trap will be sprung. Perhaps someone will scuttle his flush by flaunting the suddenly fatal five of spades. Perhaps someone will advise him that his diamonds are disqualified—didn't he see the dealer flip a black seven after the last raise? It's irrelevant why his hand is deemed irrelevant. What matters is that the other players sell him assiduously on the fact that he was in over his head, that, in the end, he was the real impostor at the table.