Oh Hell
Also known as Oh Pshaw, Blackout, Nomination Whist, Contract Whist, Up and Down the River, Elevator, Bust
- Players
- 3-7 players (best with 5)
- Deck
- 1 standard deck (52 cards)
- Time
- 30-90 minutes
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Category
- Trick-taking
Setup
Three to seven players, everyone for themselves, with one standard 52-card deck. Cards rank in the ordinary way within each suit, ace high down through king, queen, jack and the numbers to the two. There are no partnerships, and the game plays best with four to six.
A game is a fixed series of deals in which the hand size changes every time. The most common shape is an arc: start at the largest hand you have agreed on, drop one card per deal down to a single card, then climb back up to where you started. With five players starting at ten, that is 10, 9, 8 and so on down to 1, then 2, 3 up to 10 again, nineteen deals in total. Other groups run the arc upward only, or downward only, or cut it off at a round number such as seven. Decide the shape and write the sequence at the top of the score sheet before the first card is dealt, because the whole game is scored against it.
The ceiling on hand size is what the deck allows: divide 52 by the number of players and round down. Many groups shave one card off that figure, so that a card is always left over to turn for trump, and most play a shorter arc than the maximum anyway simply to keep the game to a sensible length.
Choose a first dealer at random; the deal then moves clockwise every hand. Deal the agreed number of cards one at a time to each player, then turn the next card of the undealt stock face up. Its suit is trump for that deal. That card belongs to nobody and stays face up beside the remaining stock, which is not used. On a deal that consumes the entire pack there is no card left to turn, so that hand is played with no trump at all.
Rule a grid before you start: one column per player, one row per deal, with space to record each player's bid next to their running total.
| Players | Each player gets | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | 17 cards | Largest hand the deck allows; 1 card left over to turn for trump. |
| 4 | 13 cards | Largest hand; the whole pack is dealt, so that deal has no trump. |
| 5 | 10 cards | Largest hand; 2 cards left over. |
| 6 | 8 cards | Largest hand; 4 cards left over. |
| 7 | 7 cards | Largest hand; 3 cards left over. |
Play
Bidding. With the cards dealt and trump turned, each player in turn starting to the dealer's left, and finishing with the dealer, announces out loud exactly how many tricks they intend to win. Bids are spoken in order, not written secretly, so later bidders are better informed than earlier ones. Zero is a legal and frequently correct bid. No bid may exceed the number of cards in the hand.
The hook. Bidding last is less of a privilege than it looks, because one figure is always barred to the dealer: whichever one would leave the table's bids balancing perfectly against the tricks in the hand. Somebody is therefore certain to fail every deal. Say the hand is five cards and the four earlier bids were 1, 2, 0 and 1, totalling four; every number is open to the dealer except 1. This is the rule the game is named for, and it exists to stop a table from politely arranging for everyone to succeed. Where the earlier bids have already overshot what the hand contains, nothing at all is barred to the dealer, since no bid can bring the total back down.
Write every bid on the score sheet before a card is played. Bids cannot be revised once the first lead is made.
The play. Whoever sits on the dealer's left opens, and may open with anything at all — trump included, since nothing here holds it back. Going clockwise, anybody holding the suit that was led has to play one. A player holding none of the led suit may play any card, trump or otherwise, and is under no obligation either to trump or to try to win. Whichever trump on the trick is biggest takes it; with no trump on it, the biggest card of the opening suit does. The winner of the trick leads to the next. On a no-trump deal nothing can beat the opening suit, so its biggest card always wins.
Keep the tricks you win in your own stack rather than a communal pile, since everyone has to be able to count their own at the end. In long hands it is worth restating bids aloud partway through.
The one-card deal. Each player holds a single card and has no decision to make in the play at all, so the entire hand is the bidding: you are guessing whether your card beats everyone else's. These deals swing the scoreboard hard, and they are the reason the arc bottoms out at one card rather than stopping higher.
When the last trick of a deal has been taken, compare each player's count with their bid, score the hand, gather the cards, and pass the deal one seat clockwise. Play continues until the agreed sequence of deals is exhausted.
Goal & scoring
You win by holding the highest total when the agreed run of deals is finished. There is no target to race to and no sudden-death ending; the game is over when the arc is over.
Two methods are in general use, and you have to settle which before the first deal, because they reward completely different bidding.
The one usually described as the most widespread is the generous one: every player takes 1 point per trick won whatever happened, and anybody who hit their bid exactly adds a flat 10 on top. A bid of 2 brought home is 12; missed, it still pays a point a trick, which keeps a trailing player interested.
The other is all-or-nothing. Hit your contract on the nose and the hand pays a flat 10 with the size of the contract added, so a fulfilled 3 is worth 13 and a fulfilled 0 is worth 10; land anywhere else, above or below, and it pays nothing whatever. Overtricks earn no consolation at all — bidding three and taking four is exactly as worthless as bidding three and taking two, which is what makes deliberately dumping a trick on an opponent a real weapon. It swings harder and ends tenser, and it is where the game's other names come from: the scorer blots out every failed bid, leaving the sheet covered in blobs.
A bid of zero is the most dependable score on the sheet, since it pays 10 and requires no cards at all. It is also the hardest thing to defend once someone leads a suit you are void in and you are forced to spend a card that might win.
Ties for first place are normally just shared. Some groups settle them with a single extra one-card deal.
Variants
Alternative scoring schemes — Besides the standard 10 plus bid, two schemes are widespread. The forgiving one gives 1 point per trick taken to everybody plus a 10-point bonus for an exact bid. The punishing one gives 10 plus the square of the bid when you succeed and subtracts the square of the difference when you miss, which makes large bids enormously valuable and near-misses expensive. All three are played under the same name, so ask before you sit down.
No hook (free bidding) — Drop the restriction on the dealer entirely, so the bids may total exactly the number of tricks and every player at the table can theoretically make their contract. The game becomes friendlier and much less cutthroat, since nobody is guaranteed to fail. Some groups compromise by applying the hook only on the smaller hands, where it bites hardest.
Blind one-card deals — On the deal where each player holds one card, nobody looks at their own card. Instead each player holds it face outward against their forehead, so they can see everyone else's card but not their own, and bid on that information. It turns the most luck-heavy deal of the game into a deduction problem and is popular enough that many groups treat it as part of the standard game.
Nomination trump (Contract Whist) — Rather than turning a card for trump, the highest bidder names the trump suit, which is where the alternative name Nomination Whist comes from. Bidding then becomes a genuine auction, since the right to choose trump is worth competing for, and in this form the player who took the auction names the suit and leads to the first trick rather than the player at the dealer's left. Some versions of this form also require the first-hand bid to be made before players look at all of their cards.
Deal-pattern variations — The names attached to this game usually track its deal pattern. Up and Down the River and the British Nomination Whist run the full descending-then-ascending arc. Oh Pshaw generally means the ascending-only version, starting at one card and building up. Elevator and Blackout are used for either direction depending on the region. The rules of play are identical in all of them; only the sequence of hand sizes and hence the length of the game changes.
Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Trickster Cards, Game Rules, Official Game Rules, PlayingCardDecks.