Belote

Also known as Belote Classique, Belotte

Players

4 players

Deck

1 standard deck stripped to 32 cards (A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7 in each suit)

Time

30-60 minutes

Difficulty

Medium

Category

Trick-taking

Setup

Four players in two fixed partnerships, partners facing each other. Build the pack by pulling every card below the seven out of a standard deck, which leaves thirty-two.

Cut for the first deal. After that the deal moves to the right, and so does play — belote is one of the French games that runs anticlockwise, and getting the direction wrong is the commonest mistake at a mixed table. Traditionally the pack is shuffled only once at the start of a session and merely cut between hands, so the order the tricks left it in carries forward. Plenty of tables shuffle anyway; agree which you are doing.

Deal five cards to each player in two packets, three then two or two then three, and turn the next card face up in the middle. That card is the retourne, and it is the trump on offer. The other eleven sit face down beside it, untouched for the moment.

Before anything else, learn the two rankings, because trump and plain suits use different ones and neither is the order you already know. A plain suit runs ace, ten, king, queen, jack, nine, eight, seven from the top. In trump the jack vaults to first and the nine to second, giving jack, nine, ace, ten, king, queen, eight, seven.

Card values split the same way. Outside trump an ace is 11, a ten is 10, a king 4, a queen 3, a jack 2, and the nine, eight and seven count nothing. In trump the jack is worth 20 and the nine 14, while the ace, ten, king and queen keep their ordinary values and the eight and seven are still blanks. The pack therefore holds 152 points, and the final trick is worth 10 more, so every deal puts 162 on the table before any declaration is counted.

Play

Bidding. Starting with the player on the dealer's right and going round to the right, each player in turn either takes the retourne's suit as trump or passes. Whoever takes it becomes the taker, picks the card up into hand, and commits their partnership to the contract. If all four pass, a second round starts from the same seat, and now a player may name any of the other three suits as trump — never the suit that was turned. Taking in the second round still means taking the card: the taker adds the face-up card to their hand, where it is now just an ordinary card of a plain suit. Four more passes and the hand is dead; the cards are gathered and the next player to the dealer's right deals afresh.

Once trump is settled the rest of the pack goes out. The taker, already holding the turned card, gets two more; each of the other three gets three. Everyone finishes with eight and nothing is left over.

Declarations. Combinations held in the hand pay, but only one side collects them. Runs of three, four, and five or more cards in a single suit score, and so does four of a kind in any rank except the eights and sevens.

The catch is that runs are read in the ordinary order — ace, king, queen, jack, ten, nine, eight, seven — which has nothing to do with the order the cards take tricks in. The three biggest trumps sitting in your hand look magnificent and are not a run at all.

Collecting them is a contest, and it is settled over the first trick. Each player who holds something announces it as they play their card to that trick, naming the kind and, if a rival claims the same kind, the top card of it — never the suit. Once the trick is complete the best declaration at the table is known: the side that owns it scores every declaration on its side, and the other side scores none of its own, however many it was holding. Four of a kind outranks any run; between runs the longer wins, and between runs of equal length the higher top card. Should the two best still be dead level, the one in trump prevails, and if neither is in trump nobody scores. The side that has won the contest lays the cards face up as it plays to the second trick, so the other side can see the combination was real; a declaration never shown is never paid.

Belote-rebelote stands outside all of that. Hold the king and queen of trumps and you say belote as you play the first of the pair and rebelote as you play the second, which is worth 20 to your side. It cannot be outranked, it never competes with anything, and it counts whether the rest of the hand goes well or badly. Forget to say it at the right moment and it is gone.

The tricks. The player on the dealer's right leads to the first trick. What you are allowed to put on a trick is far more constrained than in most trick games:

• Follow the suit led whenever you hold it.
• When trump is led, following is not enough: play a trump higher than any already in the trick if you have one. If every trump you hold is lower you must still follow with one of them. (Most French tables demand this even when your own partner is winning the trick; a few release you. Agree before the first deal.)
• Void in a plain suit an opponent is winning, you must trump it.
• Void in a plain suit that an opponent has already trumped, you must beat that trump if you hold a higher one. If your trumps are all lower you must still play one, throwing it away for nothing.
• Void in a plain suit while your own partner is winning the trick, you are released from all of it: play any card you like, trump or not.
• Void in the suit led with no trump left at all, you are equally free, and simply discard.

Having to throw a losing trump under an opponent's higher one is the rule that catches newcomers, and the partner exemption is the one that saves them: when your partner already holds the trick, French players say the partner is master, and you are released from having to trump at all.

The highest trump takes the trick, or the highest card of the suit led when no trump is played, and the winner leads to the next. Eight tricks empty the hands.

Goal & scoring

At the end of the hand each side counts the card values in the tricks it took, whoever took the last trick adds 10 for it, and each side adds the declarations it is entitled to.

Everything then hinges on one comparison: did the takers finish with at least as many points as their opponents? If so, nothing needs adjusting anywhere and each side banks the total it just counted — and note the direction of that, because it makes a dead heat at 81 apiece a success for the takers rather than a failure. Only when the takers come out strictly behind has the deal collapsed into what French players call dedans. Nothing the takers gathered stays with them. The full 162 crosses the table, and so does every declaration point earned during the deal, theirs as well as the defenders' own, all of it written into the defenders' column. Belote-rebelote is the exception that survives: those 20 belong to the player who called them and are not affected by how badly the rest of the deal went.

Taking all eight tricks is capot and pays 90 above the trick score, so a side that sweeps the hand books 252 before anything it declared.

The match runs to 1000 points and the first side to reach it wins. Should both sides cross in the same deal, the game is drawn.

Variants

Coinche (Belote Contrée) — The tournament form, and in France at least as popular as the parent game. The retourne disappears: all eight cards are dealt at once and the players hold an auction, bidding a number of points from 80 upward together with the suit they intend to play in. Any opponent may coincher, doubling the stakes, and the bidding side may surcoincher to double them again. The contract must be made exactly as bid or the whole value goes to the defenders, which turns the game from a matter of card play into a matter of accurate valuation. Scores are normally rounded to the nearest ten.

Belote sans annonces — Belote with declarations switched off entirely, apart from belote-rebelote, which everybody keeps. Runs and four of a kind are worth nothing and are not announced at the first trick. It strips out the fiddliest part of the rules and the whole business of comparing declarations, so it is what most tables teach a beginner on before adding the announcements back in a few hands later.

All trumps and no trumps — Two extra contracts widely used in Coinche and standard across the Balkans. In tout atout every suit ranks and scores as trump, so all four jacks are worth 20 and all four nines 14, and the deal holds 248 in the cards plus 10 for the last trick, or 258. In sans atout no suit is trump, every suit ranks the plain way, and the values are doubled to compensate for how little the pack is otherwise worth — ace 22, ten 20, king 8, queen 6, jack 4, and 20 for the last trick, giving 260. Because neither total is 162, both are scaled back against it before a contract in them can be compared with a suit contract. French coinche tables often prefer a third arrangement for no trumps, counting the ace as 19 and everything else normally, which lands on 162 exactly and needs no scaling at all.

Short-handed belote — Belote for two or three players drops the partnership and keeps everything else: both rankings, the card values, the declarations and belote-rebelote, the obligations to follow, beat and trump, and the taker alone against whoever is left. What has no settled form is the deal, which differs from region to region and from app to app — some three-player versions share out all thirty-two cards and do without a talon, others keep the retourne and a face-down remainder, and the two-player versions usually draw from a stock after each trick until it is exhausted and then play out the closing tricks under the full obligations. Fix the deal and the target score before you start rather than halfway through. Useful for learning the ranking without three other people waiting.

Litige — A different way of handling the 81-all deal, which the main rules simply award to the takers. Under litige only the defenders write their 81 down; the takers' half is neither scored nor discarded but waits, unowned, and attaches itself to the next deal somebody actually brings home, going to that side on top of whatever they score there. Tie again and a second 81 joins the first, so the pot swells until a contract finally succeeds. It turns the one deal that can otherwise feel like nothing happened into something worth winning the next one for.

• classic
• counting
• partnership
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Britannica, Denexa Games, Fédération Française de Belote, iBelote, Nordic Card Games.