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Full Contact Pinochle with My Family
The Coveted Double Pinochle
Growing up, games were always a part of family life. I think Sorry and Trouble caused more fights between us siblings than just about any other point of contention. I don’t specifically recall any fistfights over Candyland, but that doesn’t mean they never happened. If they did they were never started by me, that’s for sure.Of course, when it came to getting the whole family at the table, from kids to grandparents, card games were the go-to entertainment and, yes, they caused just about as many fights and probably even more laughter, and the occasional sullen sulk. There were no fistfights, though.
Of course, when it came to getting the whole family at the table, from kids to grandparents, card games were the go-to entertainment and, yes, they caused just about as many fights and probably even more laughter, and the occasional sullen sulk. There were no fistfights, though.
The card game that we would play the most was Pinochle. Pinochle is a trick-taking game played with a deck of cards called a Pinochle Deck. Huh, how coincidental. Anyway, the Pinochle deck has all four suits with cards from the Ace to the Nine, two of each in every suit for a total of 48 cards. Aces are always top card value, then it’s Ten, King, Queen, Jack, and Nines at the bottom. Yes, Tens are worth more than Kings. This is the crazy mixed-up world of Pinochle where nothing makes sense.
Each round has three phases: bidding, meld, and trick-tacking. There are two versions of the game I’ve played, one we called “Racehorse Pinochle” where there’s a card-trading phase between bidding and meld. We played the good version. Keep your own dang cards. Rather than start in order, I’m going to work backwards. That’s how badly the “Tens are worth more than Kings” has messed me up.
Trick taking starts with the bid winner. The objective is to take cards that earn points: Aces, Tens, and Kings. The team that lost the bid is trying to pass off all their non-counters to you, because you have to earn those points, buddy. They are also trying to get as many counters as possible for themselves to make the bid-winners go under, in which they will crow and gloat about it for much of the game until something bad happens to them. This typically happens next round. The bid winner will have announced the Trump suit with help from the Russians. Trumps will beat any card of any other suit. Thus, a Nine of the Trump suit will be an Ace of non-Trump. Just like life.
Meld is shown after the bid. This is where you earn points by having certain cards in point winning combinations. An Ace or a face card of every suit is worth a good amount (generally called “Aces around, Kings around, etc.”) Having a Queen of Spades and a Jack of Diamonds is called a “Pinochle” and worth a good amount of points. “Double Pinochle” is worth more than double that and we’ll never know why.
The bidding round takes both of the above into account. If you’re playing the correct, non-card trading version that all decent Americans should, bidding serves two purposes: it takes command of the trump suit, and it signals to your partner what you can do. Oh yes, forgot to tell you that Pinochle is played with four people, partnered in teams of two. Bidding starts at “15” (which really means “150” but apparently we like to divide by 10 a lot in Pinochle), begins at the dealer’s left, and goes clockwise.
Bid scores generally mean something like this:
- 16: I have some meld, but not a lot of playable cards.
- 17: I have some Aces to help.
- 18: I have decent meld. Feel free to consider going nuts.
- 19: I have aces and meld to help, because I’m just that cool.
- 20: Oh yeah, now we’re looking at serious meld.
- 21: Serious meld? Well I’m looking at a strong suit! In your face “serious meld” guy.
Okay, maybe when you play, the commentary isn’t implied, but it sure is in our family. Bidding over 20 typically tells the table you have great cards and you want to win the bid. Bidding 24 tells the table you have Aces around which is a lot of points in meld and powerful in play. Bidding 25 means you have a run in the trump suit – Ace to Jack. Seriously, if you have a run in something, you generally want that bid because if you lose it, that means someone else names trump which is most likely not your run suit. Losing bid on a run generally makes those cards worthless (save, say, the Ace) and causes much wailing and gnashing of teeth. In our family, if this happened, the people watching football in another part of the house knew. We’d consider throwing cards in disgust but since after losing a bid we have two more phases of the round, that kept things from getting out of hand like certain Settlers of Catan games I’ve played. I totally wouldn’t be the guy throwing dice in childish anger. No. Never.
Of course, there were wrinkles in the bidding. A couple of family members ignored convention and instead just threw out numbers that sounded good to them. This was a constant source of frustration. In fact, my mother’s side of the family takes Pinochle very seriously (they are more competitive than me) and more than one player has been banned from that table for not communicating properly. If a 19 doesn’t mean aces and meld, if a 19 could mean anything, we have recreational chaos! What’s next?! Same-sex marriage?!
Despite groans of getting multiple terrible hands in a row while the opposing team’s luck seems golden, despite going “set” (failing to make as many points as bid), we played this game multiple times. Partners would switch and rotate. We would chat and laugh. My dad’s mother never played but she always loved watching us play with each other (her position in the fifth chair is missed). I suppose our excessive competitiveness and ups and down were entertaining. It was definitely a game that drew our family together. We would always be up for another game, even if we lost – especially if we lost. After all, our luck had to change eventually, right, and we had to win at least one!
My grandparents are gone. Our families don’t seem to meet nearly as often as we used to. Memories of Pinochle remain instead of actual games. And even though I could be the most sullen of anyone in the family after receiving the fifth terrible hand in a row, I would love to play Pinochle with them all again.
Maybe later I could explain Cribbage and how cutthroat we would get with that game.
Published in Group Writing
Can’t get away from Trump, even in a card thread.
This conversation is an entry in our Group Writing Series, in October about cards. In November, our theme is “Novel,” which could mean something new or book-length fiction. If you have ever read, written, or reviewed a novel or seen something new, you might consider visiting our sign-up sheet and picking a date. If you don’t grab those dates up fast, C. U. Douglas might, and it will be Trump jokes from here to December.
The game my brother and I used to fight over was Monopoly.
Oddly this one never caused a lot of arguments in our family, which would seem an obvious culprit. We never finished a game, mind you. We always got bored of it eventually.
I had to learn pinochle to marry into my wife’s family. We only played the version where you trade cards with your partner if you take the bid.
Bidding is very different, though, with their clan. “16” means you have one part of pinochle, “17” means two, “18” means three. Bidding thirty means your partner should drop out of the bidding immediately. “25” means aces around, and you want aces passed to you.
My late father in law was an excellent player that took it way too seriously at times.
I still play with my wife’s brother when we visit back to Ohio. My wife will play when there is a fourth needed.Both our children play as well.
In high school my ‘crew’ would have marathon Pinochle games that lasted till dawn. ( I particularly remember playing games with two pinochle decks of expensive plastic cards) Same with Risk . We could easily pass 10 or 12 hours playing game after game.
I haven’t played either game in decades, but your post has reminded me of how fun it was, and now I miss it. I may try to pull the boys back together for a reunion marathon game!
I majored in pinochle my freshman year of college.
My family has fond memories of pinochle too. Now that my Dad is ”gone”and my husband’s grandparents have passed away, we don’t play it at the family gatherings anymore. I’ve never been more than decent and if there were some clear coding in the bidding, I only got the jist. But it was great fun.
When my older sister came home from college, she taught me how to play pinochle. I think we played some kind of two-player version. I have totally forgotten how it’s done. Those were fun times.
I bought a pinochle deck by mistake once. Makes for a weird game of Gin.
The deck almost as weird as Sheepshead. Take a standard deck of cards, remove the twos through sixes. Rank of cards within a suit is Ace, Ten, King, 9, 8, 7. All Queens and Jacks, and all diamonds, are Trump. Rank of suits for Queens and Jacks is clubs, spades, hearts, diamonds. Queens beat jacks.
For partners, there’s no bidding. Whoever picks the blind chooses their partner by “calling an ace [suit]”, and until that ace falls in play, only the person with it knows who they are.
A man’s game, eh?
Sounds like a tough game to learn.
I will no longer play any rummy-style or reflex games with my family
because they always accuse me of being a sullen and bad sport because I always losebecause I hate the randomness of such games. And I won’t play poker for money, especially not with my father because he treats it as combat bloodsport. Give me the card games of strategy and tactics any day.Wow. Pinochle. I haven’t thought about it in years. Those were the good old days before the weight of the world crushed my spirit.
We used to play the hell out of pinochle. It was in high school and after with friends. It was our go-to game.
There’s a couple I know, they have five kids but they’re not together anymore. They were the core of our pinochle circle. Both alcoholics who have destroyed their lives. But they could count cards like no one else. It was the one thing they were amazing at.
My Grandpa in law was very good at that. He stopped playing about 6 months before he died because his mind was going and it was too horrible to him that he couldn’t keep track anymore. Basically, he stopped when he had gotten down to my level of skill:)
Takes a couple games to get down, but if you know how to play any trump game the main difference is the meld round, which can be fixed by writing up a cheat sheet. The other hard and fast rule of Pinochle is “Follow suit, but thou shalt take when possible.” i.e. You have go over the current top card even if that means trumping when you run out of a suit. This rule gives power to the bidder to draw out cards.
House rules are what vary significantly. I have a regular Pinochle game once a week. Our group rules are: bidding starts at 25 and the pass is three cards. It is a slight variation on the classic “Race Horse” 4 card pass. The other house rules sometimes include extra points for marriages in trump.
There are versions of the game for any number of players (I once played a triple deck nine player game). While I enjoy standard single deck race horse, and Navy rules double-deck, my favorite is three-handed Pinochle. It is the game with the most variance in points scored per hand.
My grandfather taught all his grandchildren how to add before the age of 6 by teaching them Cribbage. It took me till 9 to realize that there was nothing special about the number 15.
This is true. Pinochle is in the same family as Hearts and Spades.
I have to admit, “Pinochle” is a word I heard and said with decent frequency growing up, but I think this is the first time I have ever seen it written out. It was actually a while into your post before I realized I was actually familiar with this game. I guess I just always thought it would look more phonetic, like “Peanuckle”. Any idea of the etymology of the word, or where the game is from?
We played pretty infrequently in our 4-H group growing up. But I definitely had one friend who was obsessed; any time we decided to play cards she would bang the drum loudly for Pinochle. I have to believe her family played.
It started out with a “b” and maybe you can guess the rest. It came from a Swiss (French) name, which came from French, and basically meant “spectacles.” I am sure you can see how binocle (originally did not have the “h”) is related to monocle. It is believed this is because of the doubled deck.
So… pinochle tournament at the next meetup?
I played Hearts, Spades, Bridge, and Down the Tubes in college and law school. No pinochle. Must be a yankee game.
I love/loved pinochle. I grew up in a pinochle family, then all the players died or moved off before the tradition sunk into my generation. Now Ive married into a Euchre family. Fun, but lacking the longer playing depth of the game I still miss.
My pop would say your pop was right: it is a combat blood sport and if you’re not playing for money, you’re not playing poker. It has to be your own money for stakes capable of causing physical pain at the thought of losing a hand. He was too wily to fall for the “well, stake me to a C-spot, and deal” gambit we tried on him, correctly noting that all he could possibly do was win his own damn money back and that he had pretty well established that if there was one thing we didn’t take at all seriously, it was spending his money. Both pops are right, in my opinion.
My own also would say: “If you’re playing Hearts, you’re not playing Bridge–which is a serious blunder.” He had a laxer view on Craps, which he considered a fundamental life skill and lesson in capital management that we really needed to learn.
Love this post. Brings back memories. I have not played regularly since I married my wife. Her family plays “500” and she was not interested in learning pinochle. Alas.
Our family had our own way of bidding to signal to a partner what he or she had in her hand. The increment of the bid (after the “open” or 15) corresponded to the number of “legs” (i.e. cards) of pinochle a player had in his or her hand. Many fights were between partners regarding whether the used this bidding system appropriately.
Pinochle. What a game. It is my husband’s family game. (My family played cribbage.) Early in our marriage, my husband tried to teach me but we gave up because his family had no patience for a beginner. Which actually was okay with me because I had so much fun reading and listening to the table talk – which was really bad. They tossed the 9’s out of the standard pinochle deck because – they weren’t worth anything so why clutter up your hand with them. They played partners – my husband and an older cousin formed one team and my in-laws the other. When our son was little, I was concerned about the trash talk for fear that he would learn that it was acceptable card playing etiquette. As he grew up he took over the cousin’s position. My 95-year-old mother-in-law passed away several weeks ago but this summer when we were there, she would perk up when someone mentioned playing pinochle. One of the last things my husband did with his mother was play pinochle. My son may be one of the few millenials who knows how to play the game.
This game comes up in a novel I’m reading from the 1950’s – a group of men get together to play it in the story – they are all shopkeepers and get together to discuss the mob that’s trying to move their gambling machines into their stores, while playing cards and having a beer – the game was really popular with my folks – thanks for explaining it!
I’ve never understood craps, or its attraction.
“Full Contact Pinochle with my Family”. I saw this headline and immediately I’m smiling big … and wondering if you are a relative. Did a spouse, or former spouse ever get into a tiff with you over bidding signals and in frustration she tore the sleeve off a your newly purchased dress shirt? Asking because I’m just curious if you could be a former brother in law. It wasn’t funny then, but over time the memory gets me giggling.
I loved the game, but it can be difficult to explain. Every beginner in our family, was given a hand written cheat sheet when they first start playing, just so’s they didn’t mess up everyone’s designs on winning. Double pinochle was the favorite variation played, except if you played at my grandfather’s house. At grandfather’s it was single deck pinochle, and by his house rules.
Thanks so much for the memory smiles.
The way we played two player pinochle was similar to three player. We’d deal three hands and one would go unused.
Pinochle. Boy does that bring back memories. I majored in Pinochle in my first year of college, which subsequently became my next to last year in college. Study?! What study?! It’s nickel a point Pinochle night, and my partner and I won a lot of nickels. A common refrain went something like this “You %$#& guys are unbelievable”, and that was because we cheated. I won’t say how we did it because , well, it was cheating. But it did have something to do with signaling trump when one partner had loads of meld but an otherwise weak hand. I’m not proud of it, this is after all a confession and I did spend way too much time doing it and how hard is it to cheat booze addled, knuckleheaded college kids anyway, but
and that’s how Pinochle changed my life.
Sounds like a rip-roaring good time. One of these days I’m going to have to learn the game; it was big with my grandma and her friends, but her children would only occasionally play it and the two times they tried to teach it to me it never stuck. You’ve got one of the most important points though; a fun group to play with.
Try playing anything at all with @SamRhody. After a while he’ll get bored with the ordinary game objectives and start finding, ah, “alternate win conditions”. Let me tell you about a family hearts game several years back. Sam was at 90+ points, my Uncle Jimmy was in the lead (a safe assumption generally), and there were three others at the table.
Sam leads the Queen of Spades.
He knows that we’ve all got to take it, because if we don’t, Jimmy wins. If Jimmy has both the King and Ace then he’s sunk, but otherwise one of us has to take it or lose. He laughed all the way through leading the queen to my poor sister-in-law Margret jumping on the grenade.