Card Games All-in-One For Dummies®
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Card games offer the most fascinating challenges that you may ever encounter. In most games, you can manipulate the 52 pieces of pasteboard into infinite permutations and combinations. Working out those combinations is the fun part of cards — in almost every game, you don’t know what the other players have in their hands. During the course of play, you use strategy, memory, cunning, and a whole host of other qualities to put together the best hand possible (or to bluff with the worst hand out there).
All in all, figuring out the fundamentals of a new card game can bring untold satisfaction. At the same time, you don’t have to play cards all that well to enjoy yourself. Card games allow you to make friends with the people you play with and against.
If you’ve never played a card game before, you may wonder why you need to buy a book about the subject. All your friends say the games are easy to pick up, so can’t you just sit down and start playing, picking up a few rules here and there? Well, no.
Many card games have been in circulation for hundreds of years, generating scores of variations. A reference book not only explains the core rules of a game but also lists the main variations to let you choose the rules you and your friends want to play by.
Regardless of how much experience you’ve had with card games, you’ll find something here for you. Absolute beginners will appreciate that we discuss each game in this book starting at the very beginning, before a card hits the table. If you’ve played a few card games before, you can try out a new game or pick up a variation on one of your favorites.
Throughout this book, we talk about specific cards. Instead of constantly saying “the king of hearts” or “the 7 of spades” every time we refer to those cards, we abbreviate the cards and suits by using the following symbols:
We haven’t assumed that you have all that much technical knowledge. The book is aimed at serving as an introduction to many card games (and a few popular non-card casino games like Roulette and Craps). If you get hooked on a game after reading about it, you can access many other Dummies titles (all published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) that can provide more knowledge of the games. For example, if you want to focus on Bridge, check out Bridge For Dummies by Eddie Kantar. You Poker fiends can find more information in Poker For Dummies by Richard D. Harroch and Lou Krieger, and Texas Hold’em For Dummies by Mark “The Red” Harlan. If playing card games (as well as a few other bonus chapters on games, such as roulette, craps, and slots) in a casino is your thing, get a copy of Casino Gambling For Dummies by Kevin Blackwood.
In each chapter, we place icons in the margin to emphasize certain types of information.
This icon points out the wrong way to play a game. Pay special attention to these icons so you avoid finding things out the hard way.
This reinforces a point that may be less obvious (or intuitively right) than meets the eye. You should keep these points in mind as you play the game.
These icons emphasize some insights born of our experience that will help make you a sharper player.
Clear your calendar for the next few days because you’re going to be busy playing new card games and trying out smart strategies. If you want to play a variety of (mostly) quick and easy card games, head to Book 1. If you’re curious about Poker, check out Book 2; Texas Hold’em gets its own coverage in Book 3. Perhaps you’ve heard an older relative talk about her Bridge club; Book 5 introduces you to this fun but tricky game. Finally, if you’re enamored with casinos and want to try your hand at the table games, flip to Book 6. You can also go to www.dummies.com and search for “Card Games All-In-One For Dummies Cheat Sheet” in the Search box.”
Book 1
Contents at a Glance
Chapter 1
IN THIS CHAPTER
Speaking card game lingo
Getting ready for your game
Following the rules and etiquette of card games
If you’ve ever played cards, you don’t need us to explain what fun 52 pieces of pasteboard can be. But just in case, here goes …
Because you don’t know what the other players have in their hands in almost every card game, playing cards combines the opportunity for strategy, bluffing, memory, and cunning. At the same time, you don’t have to play cards all that well to enjoy yourself. Cards allow you to make friends with the people you play with and against. A deck of cards opens up a pastime where the ability to communicate is often of paramount importance, and you get to meet new faces and talk to them without having to make the effort to do so.
If you want to take the plunge and start playing cards, you encounter a bewildering range of options to choose from. Cards have been played in Europe for the last 800 years, and as a result, you have plenty of new games to test out and new rules to add to existing games.
We can’t hope to list all the rules of every card game in this book, so this chapter discusses the general rules that apply to most card games. Get these basics under your belt so you can jump in to any of the games we describe in detail later in the book.
Card gamers have a language all their own. This section covers the most common and useful lingo you encounter as you get to know various card games.
When card games come together, the players arrange themselves in a circle around the card-playing surface, which is normally a table. We describe it as such for the rest of this section.
You play card games with a deck of cards intended for that game, also referred to as a pack in the United Kingdom. The cards should all be exactly the same size and shape and should have identical backs. The front of the cards should be immediately identifiable and distinguishable.
A deck of cards has subdivisions of four separate subgroups. Each one of these subgroups has 13 cards, although the standard deck in France and Germany may have only eight cards in each subgroup. The four subgroups each have a separate identifiable marking, and in American and English decks, you see two sets of black markings (spades and clubs) and two sets of red markings (hearts and diamonds). Each of these sets is referred to as a suit.
Each suit in the United States and UK decks has 13 cards, and the rankings of the 13 vary from game to game. The most traditional order in card games today is ace, king, queen, jack, and then 10 down to 2.
As you find throughout this book, the ranking order changes for different games. You see numerous games where 10s or perhaps jacks get promoted in the ranking order (such as in Pinochle and Euchre respectively), and many games have jacks gambol joyfully from one suit to another, becoming extra trumps (as in Euchre).
Also, Gin Rummy and several other games such as Cribbage treat the ace exclusively as the low card, below the two.
Before you can start any card game, you need to ration out the cards. Furthermore, in almost every game, you don’t want any other players to know what cards you’ve been dealt. That’s where the shuffle and deal come into play.
Before the dealer distributes the cards to the players, a player must randomize, or shuffle, them in such a way that no one knows what anyone else receives. (Shuffling is particularly relevant when the cards have all been played out on the previous hand.)
The shuffler, not necessarily the player who must distribute the cards, mixes up the cards by holding them face-down and interleaving them a sufficient number of times so the order of all the cards becomes random and unpredictable. When one player completes the task, another player (frequently in European games, the player to the right of the dealer) rearranges the deck by splitting it into two halves and reassembles the two halves, putting the lower half on top of the other portion. This is called cutting the deck.
In most games, one player is responsible for distributing the cards to the players — this player is the dealer. For the first hand, you often select the dealer by having each player draw a card from the deck; the lowest card (or, perhaps, the highest) gets to deal. After the first hand is complete, the rules of most games dictate that the player to the dealer’s left deals the next hand, with the deal rotating clockwise.
Before the deal for the first hand, a process may take place to determine where the players sit. In games in which your position at the table is important, such as Poker or Hearts, you often deal out a card to each player and then seat the players clockwise in order from highest to lowest.
The player to the dealer’s left, frequently the first person to play a card after the deal, is known as the elder or eldest hand. The younger hand is the player to the dealer’s right. These players may also be known as the left hand opponent and right hand opponent (which you sometimes see abbreviated as LHO and RHO). The player sitting opposite the dealer (his partner in a partnership game) may be referred to as the CHO or center hand opponent.
The due process of a deal involves the dealer taking the deck in one hand and passing a single card from the top of the deck to the player on his left, in such a way that nobody can see the face of the card. The dealer then does the same for the next player, and so on around the table. The process continues until everyone receives their due number of cards.
Players generally consider it bad form for any player to look at his cards until the deal has been completed.
In several games, only some of the cards are dealt out. In such games, you put a parcel of undealt cards in a pile in the middle of the table. This pile is known as the stock or talon. Frequently, the dealer turns the top card of the stock face-up for one reason or another, and this card is known as the up-card.
The cards dealt out to a player, taken as a whole, constitute a hand. It’s normal practice to pick up your hand at the conclusion of the deal and to arrange the hand in an overlapping fan shape; if you like, you can sort the cards out by suit and rank, as appropriate for the game you’re playing, to make your decision making easier. Make sure, however, to take care that no one but you can see your cards. Similarly, you shouldn’t make any undue efforts to look at any one else’s hand.
Most card games need not only a dealer (a job that changes from hand to hand) but also a scorekeeper — not normally a sought-after task. The least innumerate mathematician may be landed with the task. The good news is that scientific studies have shown that the scorer generally wins the game.
In general, any irregularity in a deal that leads to a card or cards being turned over invalidates the whole deal, and the normal procedure is for the dealer to collect all the cards and start over.
However, some minor exceptions to this principle exist, and these tend to result in the dealer getting the worst penalty if he exposes cards from his own hand. But most casual games call for leniency.
Some, but by no means all, of the games in this book include another preparatory phase of gameplay during which players have to estimate how much their hands will be worth in the latter stages of the game. The game may call for a silent estimate (as in Ninety Nine), an announcement (Oh Hell!), or an auction (Euchre or Bridge), in which whoever makes the highest bid wins a right to form a prediction. The process may offer the option to make a single call (Euchre) or a competitive auction (Bridge). Either way, these phases of the game are known as the bidding.
Frequently, a contested auction results in one player or partnership winning the chance to determine the boss, or trump, suit. This right is also known as determining the contract. One player or side essentially promises to achieve something in the play of the cards in exchange for being allowed to determine which suit has special powers.
The bidding at games such as Euchre or Bridge should be distinguished from the betting at Poker or Blackjack. At Bridge, players must predict how many points or tricks respectively they can take, with penalties if they overestimate their hands’ values. In games such as Spades or Oh Hell!, underestimation is similarly penalized. However, at Blackjack, you have to pay to play, without seeing your hand. At Poker, by contrast, although you must put up a stake in order to stay in the game and receive cards, the real expenditure comes after the initial bet, when you have to pay to stay in the game.
Are you the impatient type? Want to score points even before the gameplay begins? Well, some games have a declaration phase, in which you score points for combinations of cards that are worth certain amounts based on a predetermined table of values unique to the game. You can accumulate these points in a game like Pinochle, and sometimes an exchange of cards is permitted to improve your score on the hand.
Having a number of consecutive cards in the same suit is called a run or sequence. Having three or four cards of the same rank (obviously in different suits, unless you have more than one deck of cards in play, in which case there are no such restrictions) is called a set or book.
The most important phase of most card games resides in the play of the hand. In many of the games in this book, the objective is to try to accumulate points — or, in a game like Hearts, to try to avoid accumulating points.
The standard way of accumulating or avoiding points derives from the concept that a game is made up of several distinct phases; in each phase (except for certain games like Poker and Blackjack), players detach cards from their hands and put them face-up on the table in order. Whoever plays the highest card in the suit led usually gets to collect all those cards and stack them face-down in front of him. This unit of playing cards is called a trick — your success in many competitive card games hinges on how many tricks you win during the course of play. (Again, however, some games feature trying to win specific valuable cards rather than simply trying to obtain the majority of the tricks.)
So the high card takes the trick. But how do you get to that point? Here are the steps that get you there:
The first player to act makes the opening lead, or the lead to the very first trick.
Depending on the rules of the game, the elder hand (the player to the dealer’s left), the dealer, or the player who selected the contract during the bidding process makes the opening lead.
The player who wins the trick generally leads to the next trick and so on throughout the hand, until everyone plays all their cards.
The order of play nearly always follows a clockwise or occasionally counterclockwise pattern in relation to the deal or the winner of the trick.
The player who wins the trick makes the next lead and scores or avoids points. But it doesn’t always take the high card to win the trick, and sometimes you make mistakes during the course of a hand. The following sections detail tricks and penalizing treats.
The concept that the highest card played on a trick wins the trick is a simple one, but it doesn’t do justice to the rules of most games in this book. Each has more complex rules than that. For example, in most games, it isn’t simply the high card that wins the trick; it’s the highest card in the suit led.
The point is that most games (but not all!) state that when a player leads a suit — say, spades — all subsequent players must play spades if they still have one in their hands. This concept is called following suit.
So what happens if you can’t follow suit? Well, here is where the concept of the trump suit comes in. Many of the trick-taking games have a trump suit, which has special powers. You may like to think of this as the “boss” suit, which outranks all the other suits. In games such as Whist, you select the boss suit at random. In other games, such as Euchre, the initial suit is random, but the players have a chance to select another suit if they want to. And in some games, such as Bridge, the choice is entirely up to the players playing individually or acting in a partnership.
So, what do trumps do? Well, if you have no cards in the suit led, you can put a trump on the lead (or trump it). This action is also called ruffing the trick. Consequently, the importance of the trump suit lies in the fact that the smallest trump can beat even the ace of any other suit. So, if a trick doesn’t have any trumps in it, the highest card of the suit led takes the trick; however, if one or more trumps hit the table on a trick, the highest trump takes the trick.
Most games have rules that require you to play a card in the suit led if you can; and indeed, that is your ethical requirement. However, if you can follow suit but don’t, you incur no penalty — you only face a penalty for being caught failing to follow suit! The penalty varies from game to game but is generally a pretty severe one.
In failing to follow suit, you have three terms to bear in mind:
Say your hand consists solely of clubs, diamonds, and hearts, and you’re playing out a hand where hearts are trump:
For one reason or another, players occasionally lose track of who won the previous trick. If a player neglects to remember that she’s supposed to lead, a potentially long and embarrassing pause ensues until someone plucks up enough courage to ask her whether she’s thinking about what to do next or if she’s spacing out.
More frequently, however, somebody leads out of turn, under the false impression that the action is on her. If this happens, the general rule is that the next player can accept that lead by following to the trick, if he wants to do so. Alternatively, he may be so hypnotized by the sight of the card that he may genuinely think it’s his turn to play, so he follows suit innocently.
Either way, the general rule is that the next player’s following legitimizes the original mistake. However, some games state that up until the faulty trick is completed, if anyone spots the error, you still have time to pick the whole trick up and correct the error.
The rules about exposed cards (accidentally dropping a card on the table as opposed to playing it) tend to vary, depending on whether you’re playing a partnership game or playing on your own:
Chapter 2
IN THIS CHAPTER
Discovering Solitaire basics
Exploring some common versions of Solitaire
You see many different versions of Solitaire in this chapter. The different games don’t have all that much in common, except that you can play them with a single deck of cards. Some Solitaires need more than one deck, but not the ones included in this chapter. These games range from automatic Solitaires, where you can make every move immediately without thought or forethought, to Solitaires where you can plan your game strategy for at least 10 minutes if you want to. These games aren’t easy, so if you win any of them, you’ll feel a sense of achievement.
To play Solitaire, you need the following:
Before you start enjoying the various games of Solitaire, you need to know a little technical vocabulary:
In games where the objective is to build up cards on some of the original cards, the base cards are known as foundations. As a general rule, after you place cards on a foundation pile, you can’t move them. You may build on a tableau in some cases.
The tableau and the foundation may sound like very similar items, but they differ in a few important ways. The object of a Solitaire is to build up the foundation; a tableau is just an intermediary home for the cards as they make their way to the final destination: the foundation. You use tableaus to get the cards in the right order to build on the foundation.
After you build your own foundation of Solitaire knowledge, you can begin to explore the many variations of the game. The following sections detail some of the specific types of Solitaires.
The game Accordion is also known as Methuselah, Tower of Babel, or Idle Year (presumably because of the amount of time you need to keep playing the game to win it).
Accordion is a charmingly straightforward game that can easily seduce you into assuming that it must be easy to solve. Be warned — we’ve never known anyone who has completed a game of Accordion! This challenge makes success at the game doubly pleasurable.
Accordion also takes up very little space — a major benefit because you tend to play Solitaire in a cramped space, such as while waiting in a bus station or an airport gate.
The objective of Accordion is to finish up with a single pile of 52 cards. Relative success is reducing the number of piles to four or fewer. Your chances of complete victory may be less than 1 in 1,000, but don’t let that deter you from giving this game a try! The fact that it is a very fast game to play means that you can abandon unpromising hands and move on to another without wasting much time.
The layout for Accordion is simple. Follow these steps to begin your long journey:
Turn over the next card.
If the card is either the same suit (both clubs, for example) or the same rank (both jacks) as the first card, put the second card on top of the first. If you don’t have a match, use the card to start a new pile.
Turn over the third card and compare it to the second card.
Again, if the suits or ranks of the cards match, put the third card on top of the second card; if not, start a third pile with the third card. You can’t match the third card with the first card. However, when matching cards (of suit or rank) are three cards apart, you can combine them as if the cards were adjacent. In other words, you can build the fourth card on the first one.
Continue by going through every card in the deck in this way.
We told you it was easy! The game ends after you turn over the last card. To win, you must assemble all the cards into one pile.
Shuffling the deck well is important because you work your way through the deck one card at a time, so you don’t want to make the game too easy by having all the diamonds coming together, for example. That would spoil your sense of achievement, wouldn’t it?
Your initial cards may look like one of the examples in Figure 2-1 after you lay out three cards.
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
FIGURE 2-1: At the start of Accordion, your cards may fall in this manner.
In the first example, you must create three different piles because the cards are unrelated in rank or suit. In the middle example, you can put the ♦4 on top of the ♦Q (because they share the same suit), leaving you with only two piles. In the last example, you can put the ♦7 on top of the ♦Q, which allows you to combine the two 7s, resulting in a single pile.
To see how you can combine cards placed three piles away from each other, look at Figure 2-2.
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
FIGURE 2-2: You can match cards that are three places away from each other to further your game progress.
After you turn up the ♣Q, you can place it on the ♦Q (because they’re three apart and match in rank) and then put the ♣K on the ♣Q (same suit). The ♥J then moves to the first row.
Laying the cards out in lines of three helps ensure that you properly identify the cards that are three piles apart.
When moving the cards, you frequently have to be careful to make the plays in the correct order to set up more plays. You may have a choice of moves, but you may not be sure which move to execute first. Look at a possible scenario in Figure 2-3.
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
FIGURE 2-3: Look ahead to see which move to make first.
After you turn up the ♥4, you can place it on the ♥9, which opens up a series of moves that you can play. The best option is to move the ♥4 onto the ♠4 and then move the rest of the cards into their new spaces.
Because the ♠K is three cards away from the ♣K, you can combine the two cards and then move the ♥4 onto the ♥J. Now the ♦9 is three cards away from the ♦Q, so you can combine those two cards.
If you move the ♥4 before you move the ♠K, you miss out on two possible moves.
Making an available play isn’t always mandatory. When you can choose between possible moves, play a couple more cards to help you decide which move is superior. Figure 2-4 shows you how waiting can help you make up your mind when you have a choice.
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
FIGURE 2-4: Playing the waiting game can help you make up your mind.
At this point, you may not know whether to put the ♠A on the ♣A or on the ♠K because your piles don’t indicate whether you should keep aces or kings on top of your piles.
If several piles have kings on the top, you may want to avoid hiding the ♠K. Instead of jumping the gun, you turn over another card to see what happens, which turns out to be the ♠J.
Now you can see daylight: Put the ♠J on the ♠A and then on the ♠K, and then you put the ♠J on the ♥J. Now you can combine the 9s. Next, put the ♠4 on the ♠J, allowing the ♣A to go on the ♣K and the ♦9 to go on the ♦Q. Put the ♠4 on the ♠7 to move down to three piles. Wasn’t that fun? Getting a series of moves to come together like that makes up for the hundreds of unexciting plays you go through.
Play continues until you end up with one pile of cards — good luck!
Different people have different criteria for what makes a good game of Solitaire. The version called Calculation should satisfy most tests, because you can solve it in a fair amount of the time (so long as you work at it), it takes up little space, and you can devote your full attention to it or play without thinking — depending on your mood. However, unless you plan your plays carefully, the game will likely stymie you fairly early on.
In this game, only the card rankings matter — the suits of the cards are irrelevant. The object of the game is to build up four piles of cards on the foundation, from the ace on up to the king.
You begin by taking out an ace, 2, 3, and 4 from the deck and putting the four cards in a row from left to right, horizontally. These cards are the foundation on which you build — you hope — using the rest of the cards in the deck. Underneath those four foundations are precisely four waste piles, where you put cards that do not immediately fit on the foundation. Determining which pile to put those cards on is the challenging part of the game.
You build on each of the foundation piles one card at a time; however, you build up each pile in different sequences:
For each of the four piles, you have 13 moves available. After the last move, you reach the king, and your piles are complete.
You turn up cards from the stock one at a time. If the card you turn over has no legal place, you put it directly on top of one of the four waste piles that you create below the foundation. As soon as the card becomes a legal play on a foundation pile, you may take the card from the top of the waste-pile (but not from the middle of the waste-pile) and move it up.
When you have a legal move (you can put a card on one of the foundation piles), go ahead and make it. Don’t wait to see what other cards you may turn up, because you may end up burying a card you could have played.
You can’t move cards from one waste-pile to another. After a card is on one pile, you can move it only to the foundation. And just because a waste-pile is empty doesn’t entitle you to move cards from another waste-pile into the gap.
You arrange the waste-piles so you can see all the lower cards in them to maximize your strategic planning.
Kings are exceptionally bad news in Calculation. They’re always the last cards to go on each of the foundation piles, and when you put them on the waste-pile, they can easily block everything beneath them. In a strange way, it’s good to turn up kings at the beginning of the game — you can put them on the bottom of each of the waste-piles or put them all together in one pile.
As a general rule, try to keep one waste-pile reserved for the kings. However, if two or three kings appear early, it’s a reasonable gamble to use all four piles and not keep one for the kings.
Figure 2-5 shows an example of the start of a game. Having selected your ace, 2, 3, and 4 from the deck, you start turning over the cards one at a time.
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
FIGURE 2-5: A sample game of Calculation.
Try to construct lines in the waste-piles in reverse. For example, if your 4 pile is lagging because you’re waiting for a queen, and you put a 7 on a jack on a waste-pile, put a 3 on top of the 7 if it comes up. You hope that when the queen emerges, you can put the 3, 7, and jack on at one time and advance matters efficiently.