Whist
Also known as Straight Whist, Partnership Whist, English Whist
- Players
- 4 players
- Deck
- 1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed
- Time
- 30-60 minutes
- Difficulty
- Simple
- Category
- Trick-taking
Setup
Whist seats exactly four, playing as two fixed partnerships, with partners opposite each other. Use a 52-card pack with the jokers taken out. In play the cards rank ace high down to 2 low.
Draw for partners and for the first deal at the same time. Spread the pack face down and have everyone take a card, counting the ace as low for this purpose only. The two lowest cards play against the two highest. Of that winning pair, whoever drew the better card takes the first deal and the other becomes their partner. Anyone who draws a duplicate rank or the bottom card of the pack draws again. After the first hand the deal moves one seat to the left.
Shuffle, offer the cut to the right, then deal the whole pack out singly and clockwise, first card going to the dealer's left. Everyone ends up with 13. The last card dealt belongs to the dealer, but rather than being tucked into their hand it is laid face up on the table. Its suit is trumps for that hand. It stays face up where everyone can see it until the dealer plays to the first trick, at which point the dealer takes it into hand and it becomes an ordinary card. From that moment on, remembering what it was is your own problem.
There is no bidding, no exchange of cards and no stock. As soon as the trump is turned, play begins.
Play
Whoever sits to the dealer's left opens the first trick, and may lead absolutely any card. Play then goes clockwise, one card from each player.
You must follow the suit that was led if you hold a card in it. Only when you are void may you play something else, and then you may play anything: a card of a third suit, which cannot win, or a trump, which can. Trumps outrank everything else, so if any were played the highest of them takes the trick; if none were, the highest card of the led suit does. Each trick is opened by whoever won the last. All thirteen tricks are played out; there is no way to end a hand early, no concession and no discard pile.
How the tricks are stored matters more than beginners expect. One player from each partnership gathers every trick that side wins and stacks them face down in front of them, squared up and countable, rather than scattering them. Once a trick has been turned over and covered by the next one it is closed, and you are not allowed to look back through earlier tricks. Remembering what has gone is the whole skill of the game. The trick just completed is the single exception. It stays available on request until somebody leads to the following one, after which it joins everything else you are expected to be carrying in your head.
There is nothing to say during a hand. Whist is deliberately silent: no table talk, no remarks about your holding, no reaction to a partner's card. That is a rule about speech, not about information — signalling through the cards themselves is ordinary whist technique, and the standard discard is a suit preference signal, a low card of your strongest suit thrown when the opponents are drawing trumps. The turned trump and the fall of the cards are the only information anyone is entitled to, and drawing inferences from them is what you are there to do.
Playing off-suit when you could have followed suit is a revoke. It becomes established once the offending side has led or played to the following trick, and it has to be claimed before the cards are gathered and cut for the next deal. The non-offending side then picks one of three remedies: take three of the offenders' tricks and add them to their own pile, add 3 points to their own score, or take 3 points off the offenders'. Whichever is chosen, the revoking side cannot win the game on that deal, so a revoke made while sitting on 4 points in a 5-point game is expensive twice over. A revoke spotted and corrected before the trick is turned is usually just fixed on the spot, with the withdrawn card left face up as information for the opponents.
When the thirteenth trick is done, each side counts the tricks it won and the deal is scored. The deal then passes one seat to the left and the next hand is dealt.
Goal & scoring
Six tricks is the book and is worth nothing at all. Only tricks beyond six count, at 1 point each, which means a single hand is worth at most 7 points and only one side can ever take trick points from a given deal.
A game is 5 points in the standard British short whist. American short whist traditionally used 7, while the older long whist ran to 9 or 10, which is where the game's reputation for endless sessions comes from. Whichever target you use, a rubber runs until one side has won two games. If one side wins the first two games the third is not played.
Settling a rubber is a separate count from the points that win a game, and the two are easy to run together. When play is for stakes, a game won is worth 1; a game in which the losers took only 1 or 2 points is a double and worth 2; a game in which they took none is a triple and worth 3. Winning the rubber adds a 2-point bonus on top. The rubber is settled by the difference between the two sides' totals on that scale, not by the difference between the trick points they accumulated along the way.
Honours are the ace, king, queen and jack of the trump suit, and what counts is where they were dealt, not who captured them during play. Add up what the two partners held once the hand is over: holding three of them pays the pair 2 extra points, and holding the lot pays 4. Two limits apply. Trick points are always counted before honours, so a side that reaches the target on tricks wins immediately. And a side already standing at 4 points towards a 5-point game may not score honours at all, on the principle that you should not be carried over the line by cards you merely held. Because tricks are settled before honours and only one side can score tricks in a deal, a game can never finish level: whichever side reaches the target on tricks has already won before any honours are added.
Many modern groups drop honours entirely and score tricks only, which makes the game a cleaner test of play. Decide which you are using before the first deal.
Variants
Bid Whist — The American partnership game built on whist, played hard and fast. Both jokers join the pack as a big and a little joker, each player is dealt 12 cards and six go face down as the kitty. Bidding runs from 3 to 7, meaning tricks above the book of six, and the winning bidder names trump or no-trump plus a direction: uptown, with the ranks in their usual order, or downtown, with them inverted so that after the ace the 2 is the strongest card and the king the weakest. The high bidder takes the kitty into hand and buries six cards face down, and the kitty then counts as a book won by the bidding side — which is why the hand is reckoned as 13 books from 12 cards each. Scoring is one-sided: the bidding side takes 1 point for each trick it wins above the book when it makes its contract and loses the full value of its bid when it is set, while the defenders normally score nothing and are playing purely to set the bid. Game is 7 points, and a side driven to minus 7 loses outright.
Knock-Out Whist — A short elimination game for two to seven players and a staple of British family card play. The first hand is seven cards each, with the top card of the undealt remainder turned to set trump. Tricks are played as in ordinary whist, but nothing is scored: any player who wins no tricks at all is knocked out. From the second hand on, the player who took the most tricks names trump outright after looking at their cards instead of turning one, with ties settled by cutting cards. That privilege is the only thing winning earns: the deal still rotates to the left, and the lead still belongs to the player on the new dealer's left. Hands shrink by one card every round, seven down to one, and the last player standing wins — or the game ends early if somebody takes every trick in a round, which knocks out everyone else at once. A common kindness is the dog's life: the first player to take no tricks is dealt a single card for the following hand and may hold it back until whichever trick they choose. Win with it and they re-enter properly; fail and they are out.
German Whist — The two-player version, and the best-known one. Deal 13 cards each and put the remaining 26 face down as a stock with the top card turned up; its suit is trump for the entire hand. The first thirteen tricks are played for the stock rather than for score: the winner of each trick takes the exposed card, the loser takes the next card unseen, and a fresh card is turned. When the stock is exhausted both players hold 13 known-quality cards and play them out, the winner of the thirteenth trick leading to the fourteenth. Only these last thirteen tricks count, and whoever takes the majority of them wins the hand; some score it instead, a point for each trick above six, and some count all 26. The first half is a card-drafting duel, the second half is pure technique.
Solo Whist — Still four players and still thirteen tricks, but the fixed partnerships are gone and every deal opens with an auction instead. The contracts run from a proposal to take eight tricks alongside whoever accepts it, through a solo for five tricks alone, a misère for taking none at all and an abundance for nine, up to an abundance declared for all thirteen. Every contract but that opening proposal is one player against the other three, and each deal is settled in units paid across the table rather than written down and carried forward. It has its own entry in this collection.
Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Bicycle Cards, Britannica, Official Game Rules, Trickster Cards, Gamerules.com, Card Game Rules.