Pinochle

Also known as Pinocle, Penuchle, Partnership Auction Pinochle

Players

2-4 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 pinochle deck (48 cards: two each of A, 10, K, Q, J, 9 in every suit), which you can build from two standard decks by keeping only those ranks

Time

45-90 minutes

Difficulty

Complex

Category

Trick-taking

Setup

This entry describes single-deck partnership auction Pinochle: four players, two fixed partnerships, one 48-card pinochle pack. Double-deck partnership Pinochle, which is at least as widely played in North America, is described under variants.

Each suit is twelve deep rather than thirteen, because it holds only six ranks and holds each of them twice: ace, ten, king, queen, jack, nine. Forty-eight cards in all. Rank within a suit is not what you expect: the ace is high, but the ten sits second, above the king. The full order is A, 10, K, Q, J, 9 from high to low. When two identical cards meet in the same trick, the one played first outranks the copy.

Partners face one another across the table. Settle the first deal however you like, high cut being usual, then pass the deal clockwise. Shuffle, cut, and deal every card out clockwise in packets of three or four until each player holds twelve. There is no stock and no widow in this version; all 48 cards are in hands from the start.

Rule a score sheet with one column per partnership. Each hand produces a bid, a meld figure and a trick figure for each side before anything is combined, so leave room to write all three rather than only a running total.

Agree two house questions before the first deal, because tables differ and both change how you bid: whether the contracting side exchanges four cards after naming trump, and whether you are playing to 1000 points or some other target.

Play

A hand runs in three stages: the auction, the meld, then twelve tricks.

The auction. Bidding opens with the player to the dealer's left and moves clockwise. A bid is the number of points your side undertakes to score this hand, meld and captured counters combined. The usual minimum opening bid is 250, though 200 and 300 are both common house figures, and each later bid must beat the previous one, normally in steps of 10. Passing puts you out of the auction for the rest of that hand: you cannot come back in when the bidding returns to you. The auction therefore ends as soon as three of the four players have passed, whether or not those passes were consecutive, and the one player still live holds the contract for their side. A passed-out auction is handled in one of three ways, so choose in advance: require the player to the dealer's left to open at the minimum so that there is always a contract, which is the most common fix; oblige the dealer to take it at the minimum; or throw the hand in, pass the deal and redeal.

Naming trump and the pass. Whoever wins the auction declares the trump suit. An exchange of four cards each way is common at that point: the partner picks four, slides them across the table face down, and the bidder, after studying them, sends four back. Nothing obliges the bidder to return what arrived — four cards out of the original holding is equally legal, as is any mixture of the two. Where no exchange is used the bidding runs distinctly more cautious, which is precisely why this belongs on the list of things settled before cards are dealt.

Melding. All four players lay their scoring combinations face up on the table at once. Each side adds its meld aloud, the totals are written down, and the cards are then taken back into hand before any card is played. Only what is in your hand at that moment counts; nothing you capture later in the play can be added to it. Overlap between combinations of unlike kinds is allowed, so a single physical card can earn its keep several times over. Hold the spade queen and she pays inside the spade marriage, again inside the pinochle alongside the diamond jack, and a third time inside the set of four queens, all from the one card. What is barred is spending a card twice on the same kind of combination, so a spade queen sitting between two spade kings still yields a single marriage rather than a pair of them. None of it is banked until you take a trick, though: a side that goes through the whole play without winning even one records nothing for everything it laid down.

The tricks. The high bidder leads to the first trick and play runs clockwise. Give this one a moment before you start, because it is the rule most likely to differ from what somebody at the table learned: in the auction game the lead belongs to the contractor, but the versions of partnership Pinochle played without an auction hand it to the player at the dealer's left instead. The rules for playing a card are strict, which is the feature that separates Pinochle from most trick games:

• If you can follow suit you must, and if you can also beat the highest card of that suit already played, you must do that as well.
• Void in the suit led, you are obliged to trump if you have anything to trump with, and that obligation stands even when your trump is already beaten.
• If the trick has already been trumped and you cannot follow suit, you must beat the trump on the table when you are able; holding only lower trumps, you must still play one of them.
• Only when you can neither follow suit nor trump may you play whatever you like.

That third rule is the one point of the play that varies: a minority of tables let a player who cannot overtrump discard instead. Settle it before the opening lead.

Any trump beats any plain card, so the trick belongs to the highest trump played to it. Where nobody trumped, it goes to whoever played the highest card of the led suit. Between two identical cards, the one led or played earlier wins. The winner of a trick leads to the next. When all twelve tricks are gone, the side that took the last trick claims a bonus, both sides count the counters they captured, and the hand is scored.

One consequence of the must-beat rule worth planning for: you cannot quietly duck a trick to protect a ten. If you hold the ace and the ten of a led suit and an opponent's ace is already on the table, you are compelled to play your own ace, and your ten is exposed for the rest of the hand.

Goal & scoring

The counters are the aces, tens and kings. In the point-count scheme most tables now use, each counter captured in a trick is worth 10 to the side that took it, and queens, jacks and nines are worth nothing. Twenty-four counters make 240, and the last trick is worth an extra 10, so exactly 250 points are available in tricks every hand. The older values, still in use, are ace 11, ten 10, king 4, queen 3, jack 2 with 10 for the last trick, which comes to the same 250.

Meld values in the single-deck game:

• Run in trump (A-10-K-Q-J of trump): 150. Both trump runs at once: 1500, although some tables score them simply as 150 apiece.
• Royal marriage, the king and queen of trump: 40.
• Plain marriage, king and queen of any other suit: 20 each.
• Dix, the nine of trump: 10 each, so 20 for the pair.
• Pinochle, the queen of spades with the jack of diamonds: 40. Double pinochle: 300.
• Aces around, one ace of each suit: 100. Double: 1000.
• Kings around: 80. Double: 800.
• Queens around: 60. Double: 600.
• Jacks around: 40. Double: 400.

A run already contains the royal marriage, so you do not also claim the 40 for it.

Settling a hand. Each side totals its meld together with the counters it captured. Where the contractors have matched or beaten the number they bid, both columns simply take what was earned. Falling short is another matter: the contract is set, everything the contracting pair earned that hand evaporates, and their column takes a penalty the size of the bid itself, which is quite capable of pushing a total into the negatives. Some groups soften that by letting a set side keep the meld it laid down and only deducting the bid; the harsher version given here is the more common one. The defending side scores its meld and counters as normal, subject to the same requirement that meld needs at least one trick to stand, which means a defending pair shut out of every trick records nothing at all for the hand.

The game runs to an agreed total, with 1000 and 1500 both in common use, and the first side past it wins. Should both sides cross in the same deal, the declaring side takes the game whatever the two totals actually are — they carried the contract, so they get the benefit of arriving first. The customary tie-break is that the contracting side's score is settled first, so if both sides cross the target in the same hand the contractors win, having taken the risk. Some groups play to 1500, and some let a side stop play mid-hand to claim the game.

Variants

Double-deck partnership Pinochle — Four players in partnerships with an 80-card pack: two pinochle decks combined with all the nines removed, so four copies of A, 10, K, Q and J in each suit. Everyone gets 20 cards. Bidding opens at 50 and rises in steps of one or five. Meld values are roughly a tenth of the single-deck figures, so a trump run is 15, aces around 10, kings around 8, queens around 6, jacks around 4, a royal marriage 4, a plain marriage 2, a pinochle 4 and a double pinochle 30. Counters are the aces, tens and kings at 1 point each, 48 in total, plus 2 for the last trick, giving 50 points in tricks per hand. Game is 500. There is no card pass, and the same must-follow, must-beat, must-trump rules apply. Many North American players regard this as the standard modern form of the game.

Two-handed Pinochle — The classic head-to-head game, and the oldest form. Each player gets 12 cards from the 48-card pack and the remaining 24 form a face-down stock with its top card turned up to set trump. There is no auction. After each trick the winner may lay down one meld and score it immediately, then draws the top card of the stock while the loser takes the next, so both are back to 12 cards. On winning a trick you may also swap the dix, the nine of trump, for the exposed trump card. Suit-following and must-beat rules do not apply while the stock lasts; once it is exhausted, including the final face-up trump, the last 12 tricks are played under the strict follow, beat and trump rules. Counters score as in the four-handed game and the last trick is worth 10. Game is usually 1000, and if both players cross the target in the same hand the one with the higher total wins.

Three-handed Auction Pinochle — The best-known solo form, played with the 48-card pack. Each of the three players gets 15 cards and three go face down as a widow. Players bid, minimum usually 300, and the high bidder turns the widow face up, takes it in, names trump, and buries any three cards, which count toward the bidder's own trick score if they are counters. The bidder then plays alone against the other two, who cooperate. The bidder must reach the bid with meld plus counters or be set for the amount bid; the defenders score nothing but the satisfaction of setting the contract, and games are frequently settled per hand in chips rather than by a target total.

Traditional counter values — Instead of counting each ace, ten and king as 10, some tables use the historical values of ace 11, ten 10, king 4, queen 3 and jack 2, with the nine worth nothing and 10 for the last trick. The total available is identical at 250, but the distribution differs, making individual aces and tens relatively more valuable and kings less so. Worth confirming which scheme is in use before bidding, since it slightly shifts what a hand is worth.

• classic
• counting
• long-game
• partnership
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Britannica, Trickster Cards, Denexa Games.