Pinochle
Pinochle is a trick-taking card game played with a 48 card deck consisting of two copies of the 9, 10, jack, queen, king and ace cards of all four suits. Each player is dealt twelve cards, which they arrange to produce various meld combinations worth specific amounts of points. When the game involves four players, the participants split into two teams.
Fast Facts
- Derived from the game of Bezique
- Can be played with two, three or four players
- Bids must be a multiple of 10 or 25
- Types of melds:
- Arounds: Four matching cards of different suits
- Marriages: King and queen of the same suit
- Pinochle: The jack of diamonds and the queen of spades
- Double Pinochle: Both jacks of diamonds and queens of spades
- Runs
- Flushes
- Thumb wrestling is called pinochle in some parts of the Southern United States
Bidding and Melding
After examining their cards, players bid by predicting the amount of points their hand could earn through a combined total of meld points and the number of tricks they could take during play. The highest bidder earns the right to declare the trump suit and other players may not meld until the highest bidder has done so.
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