A Sixpence at Whist has been all about choices. In deciding how to spend their hours away from the shop and the office, the people of England's eighteenth-century middle classes had more options than ever before. While some of the newer fashions were small-scale – a shopping excursion, hosting a small party to tea – others afforded new opportunities to perform on the wider stage of the assembly or the pleasure garden, and to watch others do the same. For the middling sort, reputation was key to survival: they needed to consider every professional and public move they made, lest it damage their name, their firm's name, their family's name, and the creditworthiness that went with them. And when they came to consider what leisure activities they could safely and comfortably enjoy, they employed similar criteria. What sort of social settings were most respectable? Which offered the most return on their sociability investment, and what company would work most to their advantage? Within those settings, when cards were on offer, choices again presented themselves: to play or not to play? Which games to play, and where to play them? How much to bet? How late to stay, and at whose table?

The pattern of play created by the answers to these and other questions is a remarkably, even overwhelmingly, consistent one. In the diaries, letters, account books, and other personal writings of middling people, the dominant image is of sociable play: people playing cards and mingling their coins in the process of enjoying one another's company. Even card clubs, nominally formed with play as their primary purpose, were clearly conscious of the pleasure of getting together with friends, and of what was needed to enjoy their meetings to the full. Naturally, they made the most of their chances to display their fine feathers and their elegant manners, and access to business contacts and the marriage market was an incentive for many; but ultimately, these people played, first and foremost, for fun.