Pinochle

Pinochle: the trick-taking game that scores before a single trick is played

Pinochle is really two games stacked on top of each other. The first is a game of melds: combinations you hold in your hand and score simply for showing, like a run of the top five trumps or one ace of every suit. The second is an old-fashioned trick-taking game with a trump suit, played with a deck that has two of every card and a rank order in which the ten beats the king. What joins the two is the auction. You bid a number, and your side has to reach it with meld and tricks combined, or lose the bid from your score.

This page teaches the four-player partnership game with a single 48-card deck, the version Pagat treats as the standard, using the simplified scoring almost every modern table uses. The engine behind the board above was checked against Pagat's rules with fixtures and then run through several thousand simulated games, and the numbers on this page come from those runs rather than from folklore.

Where Pinochle comes from

The family tree runs through France and Germany. Bezique, a two-player game with a doubled 32-card deck, was the fashionable game of the 1850s, and it already had the combination that gives Pinochle its name: the Queen of spades with the Jack of diamonds, scored as a meld. In the Württemberg dialect game of Binokel the deck was cut to the nine and up, and it is that game, not Bezique itself, that German immigrants carried to the United States in the nineteenth century. The American spelling is a phonetic rendering of the German name, which in turn came from the French binocle, "two eyes," for the two cards that make the meld.

In America it became something close to a national game. The three-handed auction form filled the Hoyles of the 1920s and 1930s, and the partnership game took over the kitchen tables of the Midwest and the Northeast after that. It remains, in Pagat's phrase, popular in America and almost unknown elsewhere. One story that gets repeated about it, and is worth repeating with the caution that it is a story, is that the city of Syracuse, New York, banned the game in 1918 for being German.

The deck: 48 cards, two of each, and the ten outranks the king

A Pinochle deck is two ordinary decks stripped to the nine and above and shuffled together: Ace, Ten, King, Queen, Jack, Nine in each suit, two of every card, 48 in all. Pinochle decks are sold ready-made, but any two matching decks will do. The rank order is the game's first trap. It runs Ace, Ten, King, Queen, Jack, Nine, with the ten sitting above the king, as it does in Bezique and in most of the old European point-trick games. A hand that reads "K-Q-J" in every other game is the middle of the suit here.

The duplicate cards matter in play. When two identical cards are played to the same trick, the first one played wins. If your partner leads the Ace of spades and you hold the other Ace of spades, yours cannot beat it, which turns out to be a small mercy under the play rules below.

How the bidding works

The player to the dealer's left bids first, and bidding goes around clockwise. Each bid is a number of points, starting at 25, and every bid must be higher than the last. You may raise by one or jump by as much as you like. A player who passes is out of the auction for the rest of the hand. When three players have passed, the remaining bidder has bought the contract at their last bid, and their side now has to score at least that many points between meld and tricks.

Bids are not attached to a suit. The bidder names trump only after winning the auction, and in the single-deck game may name any suit at all, marriage or no marriage. (The double-deck game is stricter; see the variations section.) If the first three players all pass, the dealer is "stuck": they take the contract at 25 whether they want it or not. In practice this is rare with sensible bidders, because an average hand is worth far more than 25, which is the subject of the strategy section.

What to pass, and what to pass back

Once trump is named, the bidder's partner chooses four cards and passes them face down to the bidder. The bidder adds them to their hand, and then passes four cards back, which may include any of the four just received. The opponents pass nothing. This is the mechanism that makes partnership Pinochle a partnership: your partner's bid is a promise, and the pass is how you keep it.

The conventional advice, and it holds up, is to send the bidder trumps first, then any plain-suit aces, then whichever cards do the least damage to your own meld, since your meld counts for the side too and a marriage broken up to send filler is four points thrown away. The bidder's return is the more interesting decision and is measured below: the right cards to send back are not the worst cards in the hand.

Meld values: how to count your meld

After the pass, every player lays their melds face up on the table, and each partnership adds its two players' melds together. The cards go back into the hand for the play. There are three classes of meld, and the values below are the simplified ones used on this table and on most modern ones. If you learned Pinochle with a run worth 150 and a marriage 20, multiply everything here by ten and you have the old scale.

The rule that trips people up is how melds share cards. A card may be used in one meld of each class, but never in two melds of the same class. The Queen of spades can be half a pinochle (class B), one of your queens around (class C) and half a spade marriage (class A) all at once, for 12 points from a single queen. What it cannot do is be half of two spade marriages. This is also why a run does not score its own royal marriage on top: the K-Q inside a run are already in a class A meld. Hold a second King or Queen of trump, though, and it pairs with the run's Queen or King for a second marriage, which is where the 19 and 23 come from.

Those figures are worth having in your head at the table. A run is a genuine event, dealt to one hand in twenty-six; aces around to one in thirty-six. The melds you will actually hold most hands are a dix, a marriage or two and, one hand in five, a pinochle. The pass changes the picture a good deal: in the simulated games the bidding side's meld went from 12 points between the two hands before the exchange to 20 after it, and the bidder's own meld nearly doubled, from 9.5 to 17.

Do you have to beat the card in Pinochle? Yes, and you have to trump, too

The bidder leads to the first trick, and any card may be led. After that the rules of play are stricter than in Spades or Hearts, and they are the thing this page most wants you to leave knowing:

1. Follow suit if you can.
2. If you follow suit, you must beat the card currently winning if you can. This is called heading the trick, and it applies whether the winning card belongs to an opponent or to your partner. If nothing you hold beats it, any card of the suit will do.
3. If you cannot follow suit, you must play a trump. If a trump has already been played to the trick, you must play a higher trump if you can; if you cannot, you must still play a trump, even a nine into a trick you have no hope of winning.
4. Only with no card of the led suit and no trump may you play anything you like.

The trick is won by the highest trump, or the highest card of the led suit if no trump was played, with the first of two identical cards winning. The winner leads next. After twelve tricks the hand is scored.

How often does the rule actually bite? In the simulated games, one follow-suit decision in seventeen (6.0%) was one where the player had to head the trick and would rather not have, and one in seventy-five (1.3%) was a forced play over their own partner's winning card. One must-trump in thirty (3.2%) was a trump thrown into a trick already lost to a higher trump. Rare enough that you can forget the rule for a whole hand, and common enough that the hand you forget it in will be the one it decides.

Scoring: counters, the bid, and going set

When the hand is over, each side counts the Aces, Tens and Kings in the tricks it won, one point apiece, and the side that took the last trick adds one more. That is 25 points between the two sides every hand. Each side then adds its meld, with one condition: a side that takes no trick points loses its meld. Meld is a promise about the play, and a side shut out of the play does not get paid on it.

The throw-in deserves a word, because the board offers it. After the melds are down, the bidder can see exactly how far short their side is. If the bid is 40 and the side's meld is 12, they need 28 of the 25 points in play, which is impossible; if they need 24 of 25, it is close enough to impossible that most players concede. Throwing in costs the bid, but it denies the defenders the trick points they would have taken. In the simulated games the bidding side threw in 3.3% of hands and made three bids in four (75.1%), and whether a bot threw in aggressively or only when the arithmetic left no hope made no measurable difference to its win rate.

The first side to 150 points wins. If both sides pass 150 on the same hand, the bidding side wins, on the principle that the side that bought the contract goes out first. A game runs about seven hands.

Strategy: bid, and bid the whole hand

Every piece of Pinochle advice starts with bidding, and it is right to. The computer opponents on this table bid from an estimate of what their side will score if they name their best suit: their own meld exactly, plus what the pass typically adds, plus a trick-point estimate that weighs trump length above everything else. That estimate was not guessed; it was fitted to 4,000 played hands and then checked bucket by bucket, because the first version was two to five points low on every trump length and left the dealer stuck with the bid on two hands in three.

With the estimate calibrated, the question is how far under it to bid, and the answer is: hardly at all. Bots that bid right up to their estimate did no worse than bots keeping two points in hand. Bots keeping four points in hand won fewer games, and bots keeping six won far fewer. Each extra two points of caution cost roughly six games in a hundred. A side that never bid at all won 15% of its games, which is the strongest argument on this page: a side that only defends is playing for the scraps, because the bidding side names trump, leads, and gets the pass.

• Trump length is the estimate. In the fitted model each trump in hand is worth about two trick points to the side, an ace of trump a further 1.6, and a plain-suit ace 1.3. A void was worth a third of a point and a ten backed by its ace almost nothing. Count your trumps before you count your pretty cards.
• Pass back counters, not junk. The bidder's instinct is to return the four worst cards. The better return is plain-suit tens and kings: cards that lose tricks in the bidder's hand but that a partner, void in a suit, can throw onto the bidder's winning trick for a point each. Bots returning counters beat bots returning nines and jacks 53.5% of the time over 3,600 games, ±0.8. It is the advice Pagat gives, and on this site, where three games running have found the received wisdom worthless, it is worth saying that Pinochle's held up.
• Lead trump from the top if you bid, then stop. The bidder's side has the long trumps; leading the ace pulls two trumps out of the defenders for each one of yours and stops them ruffing your plain-suit aces later. Measured: a bidding side that refused to lead trump while it held a plain card won 43.8% of games against the shipped bot, ±1.8, a six-point loss. But a side that led its highest trump at every opportunity won 46.6%, ±1.8, no better and probably worse than pulling trump while holding the boss card and then cashing aces. The defenders' instinct is the opposite: lead short suits and hope to ruff.
• Feed your partner. When your partner is winning a trick and nothing behind you can take it, the must-head rule may not apply, since you cannot beat a card of your own side that is already top. Play a ten or a king onto it. A counter on your partner's trick is a point exactly as much as a counter on yours.
• Do the arithmetic when the melds go down. Bid minus your side's meld is what you need from the 25 in play. Above 20 is a hand to throw in; below 10 is a hand to play for the last trick and the extra point.

Common variations

• Double-deck Pinochle is the big one, and in much of the United States it is the game people mean by "Pinochle." Four decks stripped to the ten and up make 80 cards with no nines, 20 cards each. Bids start at 50, the bidder must hold a marriage in the suit they name or forfeit the bid, meld values are the same but a triple or quadruple combination scores far more, and 50 points are in play each hand with 2 for the last trick. Game is 500. Following suit, heading the trick and trumping are all compulsory, as here.
• Three-handed auction Pinochle is the classic form in the old Hoyles: 15 cards each and a three-card widow, the high bidder takes the widow, melds alone and plays alone against the other two.
• Two-handed Pinochle is the version Bicycle's rule card teaches. Twelve cards each and a stock to draw from, melds laid one at a time after winning a trick, then the last twelve tricks played out under the strict rules. Usually scored on the old scale, to 1,000.
• The old scale — everything here times ten, with counters worth Ace 11, Ten 10, King 4, Queen 3, Jack 2 and 10 for the last trick, 250 in play each hand. Same game, longer arithmetic.
• Passing three instead of four is common in some regions, and a few tables have the partners pass simultaneously rather than partner first.
• The last trick is worth 1 here; some tables make it 2, some 0, and a few give the whole hand's meld to whoever takes it. Agree before you deal.

How Pinochle compares to Euchre and Spades

Euchre is the closest relative on this site: the same nine-to-ace deck, singly rather than doubly, the same auction for the right to name trump, and the same German-American history. But Euchre is five tricks and a scoring table you can memorise in a minute, where Pinochle is twelve tricks, a meld phase, and an auction in points rather than a yes-or-no on a turned card. Spades shares the partnership and the bidding, but its trump suit is fixed forever and its bids are counts of tricks, not points. The thing neither game has is the meld: in Pinochle a hand can be worth 30 points before a card is played, and that is what the bidding is really about.