Card Games For Dummies. Barry Rigal

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In several games, only some of the cards are dealt out. In such games, you put a parcel of undealt cards in a pile in the middle of the table. This pile is known as the stock or talon. Frequently, the dealer turns the top card of the stock face-up for one reason or another, and this card is known as the up-card.

      The cards dealt out to a player, taken as a whole, constitute a hand. It’s normal practice to pick up your hand at the conclusion of the deal and to arrange the hand in an overlapping fan shape; if you like, you can sort the cards out by suit and rank, as appropriate for the game you’re playing, to make your decision making easier. Make sure, however, to take care that no one but you can see your cards. Similarly, you shouldn’t make any undue efforts to look at any one else’s hand.

      Most card games need not only a dealer (a job that changes from hand to hand) but also a scorekeeper — not normally a sought-after task. The least innumerate mathematician may be landed with the task — or the soberest player. The good news is that scientific studies have shown that the scorer generally wins the game. I wonder why!

      Exposing yourself (or someone else)

      In general, any irregularity in a deal that leads to a card or cards being turned over invalidates the whole deal, and the normal procedure is for the dealer to collect all the cards and start over.

      However, some minor exceptions to this principle exist, and these tend to result in the dealer getting the worst penalty if they exposes cards from their own hand. But most casual games call for leniency.

      Bidding fair

      Some, but by no means all, the games in this book include another preparatory phase of game play during which players have to estimate how much their hands will be worth in the latter stages of the game. The game may call for a silent estimate (as in Ninety-Nine), an announcement (Oh Hell!), or an auction (Euchre or Bridge), in which whoever makes the highest bid wins a right to form a prediction. The process may offer the option to make a single call (Euchre) or a competitive auction (Bridge). Either way, these phases of the game are known as the bidding.

      Frequently, a contested auction results in one player or partnership winning the chance to determine the boss, or trump, suit. This right is also known as determining the contract. One player or side essentially promises to achieve something in the play of the cards in exchange for being allowed to determine which suit has special powers.

The bidding at games such as Euchre, Pinochle, or Bridge should be distinguished from the betting at Poker or Blackjack. At Pinochle or Bridge, players must predict how many points or tricks, respectively, they can take, with penalties if they overestimate their hands’ values. In games such as Spades or Oh Hell!, underestimation is similarly penalized. However, at Blackjack, you have to pay to play, without seeing your hand. At Poker, by contrast, although you must put up a stake in order to stay in the game and receive cards, the real expenditure comes after the initial bet, when you have to pay to stay in the game.

      Making a declaration

      Are you the impatient type? Want to score points even before the game play begins? Well, some games have a declaration phase, in which you score points for combinations of cards that are worth certain amounts based on a predetermined table of values unique to the game. You can accumulate these points in a game like Pinochle, and sometimes an exchange of cards is permitted to improve your score on the hand.

      

Having a number of consecutive cards in the same suit is called a run or sequence. Having three or four cards of the same rank (obviously in different suits, unless you have more than one deck of cards in play, in which case there are no such restrictions) is called a set or book.

Playing the Game

      The most important phase of most card games resides in the play of the hand. In many of the games in this book, the objective is to try to accumulate points — or, in a game like Hearts, to try to avoid accumulating points.

      The standard way of accumulating or avoiding points derives from the concept that a game is made up of several distinct phases; in each phase (except for certain games like Poker and Blackjack), players detach cards from their hands and put them face-up on the table, in order. Whoever plays the highest card in the suit led usually gets to collect all those cards and stack them face-down in front of them. This unit of playing cards is called a trick — your success in many competitive card games hinges on how many tricks you win during the course of play. (Again, however, some games in the book, such as Setback, feature trying to win specific valuable cards rather than simply trying to obtain the majority of the tricks.)

So the high card takes the trick. But how do you get to that point? Here are the steps that get you there:

      1 The first player to act makes the opening lead, or the lead to the very first trick.Depending on the rules of the game, the elder hand (the player to the dealer’s left), the dealer, or the player who selected the contract during the bidding process makes the opening lead.

      2 The player who wins the trick generally leads to the next trick and so on throughout the hand, until everyone plays all their cards.The order of play nearly always follows a clockwise or occasionally counterclockwise pattern in relation to the deal or the winner of the trick.

      The player who wins the trick makes the next lead and scores or avoids points. But it doesn’t always take the high card to win the trick, and sometimes you make mistakes during the course of a hand. The following sections detail tricks and penalizing treats.

      Winning with high cards or trump

      The concept that the highest card played on a trick wins the trick is a simple one, but it doesn’t do justice to the rules of most games in this book. Each has more complex rules than that. For example, in most games, it isn’t simply the high card that wins the trick; it’s the highest card in the suit led.

      My point is that most games (but not all!) state that when a player leads a suit — say, spades — all subsequent players must play spades if they still have one in their hands. This concept is called following suit.

      So what happens if you can’t follow suit? Well, here is where the concept of the trump suit comes in. Many of the trick-taking games have a trump suit, which has special powers. You may like to think of this as the “boss” suit, which outranks all the other suits. In games such as Whist, you select the boss suit at random. In other games, such as Euchre, the initial suit is random, but the players have a chance to select another suit if they want to. And in some games, such as Bridge, the choice is entirely up to the players playing individually or acting in a partnership.

      

So, what do trumps do? Well, if you have no cards in the suit led, you can put a trump on the lead (or trump it). This action is also called ruffing the trick. Consequently, the importance of the trump suit lies in the fact that the smallest trump can beat even the ace of any other suit. So, if a trick doesn’t have any trumps in it, the highest card of the suit led takes the trick; however, if one or more trumps hit the table on a trick, the highest trump takes the trick.

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