President

President: the card game that rigs itself, on purpose

Most card games reset to a level table every deal. President does the opposite, and that's the entire point: whoever wins a hand starts the next one with the loser's two best cards in their pocket, and whoever loses starts it stripped of exactly those cards. The rich get richer, the poor dig, and the drama of the game is watching somebody claw their way out of the basement anyway. It's played at kitchen tables and in school lunchrooms all over the world under a pile of names — Scum, Capitalism, Kings, and at least one that we'll leave at the door — and it belongs to a family of games, the climbing games, that most Western players have never met anywhere else.

Where it comes from

Climbing games — where a lead is beaten by a higher play of the same shape, and passing costs you nothing but position — are an old East Asian tradition. President's ancestry is generally traced to Chinese games of that family, such as Zheng Shangyou ("struggling upstream"), by way of the Japanese student favorite Dai Hin Min (also played as Daifugō, "grand millionaire" — same game, named for the top role rather than the bottom one). The game seems to have arrived in the West in the 1970s and '80s and spread the way folk games do: by being taught, renamed, and house-ruled at every table it touched.

Its best-known commercial descendant is The Great Dalmuti (1995), which wraps the same climbing-and-roles idea in a custom medieval deck. As with Crazy Eights and its famous branded offspring, the relationship runs one way: the traditional game is older, public domain, and plays perfectly well with the 52 cards you already own.

The objective

Get rid of every card in your hand before the other players do. Finishing first makes you President for the next hand; finishing last makes you Scum. On this table the President scores 2 points a hand and the Vice-President 1, and the first player to 10 wins the game — but the score is really just a way of keeping count of something simpler: how often you end up on top.

Setup

A standard 52-card deck, no jokers, dealt out completely — three players get 17 or 18 cards, four get 13 each, five get 10 or 11. Uneven hands are part of the traditional game, not a defect; the deal simply runs out where it runs out. In the very first hand there are no roles yet, so there's nothing to exchange, and the player holding the three of clubs — the single lowest card in the game — leads first. After that, tradition puts the deal in the Scum's hands and the opening lead in the President's.

Three to five players is the range here, and four or five is where the game is at its best — three makes the roles brutally sticky, and past six a single deck leaves everyone with too few cards to plan with. There's no standard partnership version: the roles already create shifting, informal alliances against whoever is sitting at the top, which is most of what a partnership would give you.

Card ranking — read this twice

President does not use the ranking you're used to. Threes are the lowest cards in the game and twos are the highest, above even the aces:

3 (lowest) · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 · 8 · 9 · 10 · J · Q · K · A · 2 (highest)

Suits mean nothing at all. A two is a two, whatever it's wearing, and the four of them are the four best cards in the deck. Nearly everything in President strategy flows from that one inversion.

How a hand is played

1. The leader plays any set: a single card, a pair, three of a kind, or four of a kind — always cards of one rank.
2. Each player after them must beat it or pass. Beating it means playing the same number of cards of a strictly higher rank. A pair is answered by a higher pair — never by a single, never by three cards, and never by an equal pair.
3. Passing doesn't lock you out. If the trick comes around to you again, you're free to play. Passing just declines this particular chance — and if you have nothing that beats the current play, the table passes for you, since there's no decision to make.
4. The trick ends when everyone else passes. When a play goes all the way around the table unbeaten, the cards are cleared face down, and whoever made that last play leads the next trick with anything they like.
5. Going out. When you shed your last card, you're done — you take the next open seat at the top of the finishing order and the others play on. The hand ends when only one player still holds cards: they're the Scum, without ever getting to play them.

Roles and the exchange — where the game gets its teeth

The finishing order of one hand becomes the social ladder of the next. First out is President, last is Scum; with four or more players the seats beside them become Vice-President and Vice-Scum, and a fifth player in the middle is a plain Citizen, owing and owed nothing.

Before each new hand (after the first), tribute is paid — and the two directions are not symmetrical, which is the whole trick.

Sit with that for a second. The player who just won starts the next hand having traded their two worst cards for the loser's two best, and leads. It is not subtle, and it is not meant to be.

Which raises the obvious objection: isn't that simply unfair? It is, and it is measurably so. Running this table's computer players against each other 300 games at each size, the sitting President keeps the office more often the smaller the table:

That stickiness is the design working, not a flaw in it. The pleasure of President is not that the table is level — it is watching somebody climb out of the basement against a system built to keep them there, which only means anything because the system genuinely does keep them there most of the time.

Scoring on this table

Folk tables often don't score President at all — the roles, and the pleasure of making the Scum deal, are the stakes. Where it is scored, the common shape is a couple of points to the top seats. This table gives the President 2 points per hand and the Vice-President 1, first to 10 wins, and a tie at the target simply plays another hand until it breaks.

Strategy that actually matters

• Your hand is only as good as its worst cards. Everyone eventually has to shed the threes and fours, and the only free moment to do it is when you hold the lead. High cards win tricks; low cards decide when you can afford to. Judge a dealt hand by its bottom, not its top.
• The lead is the prize — spend big cards to get it. Winning a trick isn't about the cards you beat, it's about the free play it buys you. The rhythm of good President play is: win a trick with something high, use the free lead to dump something low, repeat.
• Hoard the twos — but spend them, don't entomb them. A two's job is to take the lead back when you need it, which is usually late. Never shed one while anything cheaper does the work — but when a two is the only card that beats the table, play it. We tested a bot that refused to, saving its twos while it held anything else at all, over four thousand simulated hands: it finished roughly two-thirds of a place worse per hand than one that spent them when they were the cheapest answer. The twos buy tempo; tempo you never buy anything with is just paper.
• Don't break your pairs without a reason. A pair answered as two singles is two chances to be outranked instead of one play that many hands simply can't follow. Sets are shape, and shape is hard to rebuild — it's also why the President's return gift is junk singles, never half of anything.
• Count the twos that have been played. There are exactly four. If you're holding one and two are gone, only one card in the room beats yours; if all four are accounted for, the aces are promoted and whoever holds them runs the endgame. This is the cheapest card-counting in any game on this site and the single biggest edge at a casual table.
• Watch the card counts, not the roles. The player two cards from going out is the threat, whatever their title. When they lead low, that's exactly when to spend a big card over the top — every trick they win from here is a launch pad.
• Playing from the basement, aim for the middle. As Scum you start two cards in the hole, and the tribute took your endgame control cards, not your junk. You usually can't win the hand — but Vice-Scum or Citizen is a real promotion, sets up a far better next hand, and only asks you to beat one or two players, not the table.

Common variations

President is a folk game with no official rulebook, so the table you learned at almost certainly played some of these. This table plays the base game; all of the following are covered here so you know what you're agreeing to when somebody proposes them:

• Twos clear the pile. Instead of merely ranking highest, a two ends the trick on the spot: the pile clears and the player of the two leads fresh. Often a single two may be thrown on any set, which makes the four twos even more powerful than they already are.
• Equal rank allowed. Some tables let you match the current rank rather than beat it, usually with a sting attached — playing the equal card "skips" the next player.
• Revolution. Imported from Daifugō: when anybody plays four of a kind, the entire ranking flips — threes high, twos low — until the hand ends or another four-of-a-kind flips it back. Transforms the endgame; announce it loudly if you play it.
• Jokers as super-twos. Shuffle in one or both jokers as the only cards that beat a two.
• Penalty for going out on a two. Ending your hand with the unbeatable card is considered poor form at many tables, and punished by dropping you straight to Scum.
• Physical musical chairs. In live play, players traditionally move seats each hand so the President holds the best chair and the Scum the worst — and the Scum deals, shuffles, and fetches the drinks. Online, the deal rotating to the Scum is what survives of this.
• No exchange. Some groups skip the tribute entirely and play roles for bragging rights only. It's a gentler, fairer game — and noticeably less pointed.