Archive for the ‘Card games’ Category

 

The declaration phase in piquet game

December 14th, 2009

In the declaration phase, the players ascertain who has the better hand in each of three categories. This is done in an oblique sort of way that leads to some of the intrigue of Piquet. Elder hand declares first, with Younger responding.
In each part of the declaration, the Younger hand may choose [...]

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Piquet rules

October 3rd, 2009

Piquet is played with a 32 card deck. Start with a standard 52 card deck and remove all of the 2’s through the 6’s. This leaves all of the 7’s through the 10’s, the face cards, and the aces.
Each game consists of a partie of six deals (partie meaning part in French). [...]

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Piquet

August 18th, 2009

French Piquet deck
Piquet is a card game for two players. It is considered by many to be one of the best two player card games. Pronounced “pee-kay” in France, it is usually pronounced “picket” in English speaking countries.
Piquet is one of the oldest card games still being played. It originated over 500 [...]

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Lansquenet

August 4th, 2009

Lansquenet (derived from the German landsknecht (’servant of the land or country’), applied to a mercenary soldier) is a card game.
Game play
The dealer or banker stakes a certain sum, and this must be met by the nearest to the dealer first, and so on. When the stake is met, the dealer turns [...]

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Cribbage statistics

April 14th, 2009

There are 12,994,800 scoring hands in Cribbage (52c5 x 5, 5 cards then any of those 5 as the turn up card).
Approximately 8.5% of randomly drawn four-card hands will score 0 (not including pegging).
The highest score is 29 (555J in hand with the turn-up 5 of the same suit as the Jack).
The [...]

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Cribbage tactics

March 14th, 2009

Forming the crib
There are certain cards and card combinations that are likely to be beneficial to a hand, so a non-dealer should try to keep them in his hand and the dealer should try to keep any good combinations together, either in his hand or in the crib. It is less beneficial [...]

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Cribbage show

February 27th, 2009

Each player in turn (in the order of play), ending with the dealer, totals up the points in his hand, including the turn-up card, and pegs the amount. The order in which this is done is important as a player who tallies his score first may peg out and thus win the [...]

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Playing cribbage

February 9th, 2009

The dealer rotates with each hand, and this is important because of the advantage the crib gives to the dealer (especially in five-card). If at any point in a hand a player pegs out (reaches the winning score), then the game ends and he wins. A notable feature of cribbage is that [...]

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Cribbage

January 30th, 2009

Cribbage or Crib is a card game for two, three or four players that involves forming combinations of cards over a series of hands to accumulate points. Points are mainly scored by runs, regardless of suit; by pairs, triples and quadruples; by flushes; and by cards that add up to 15.
Cribbage is [...]

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Bridge on the Internet

January 22nd, 2009

There are several free and some subscription-based servers available for playing bridge on the Internet. OKBridge is the oldest of the still-running Internet Bridge services; players of all standards, from beginners to world champions may be found playing there. SWAN Games is a more recent competitor. Bridge Base Online is mostly [...]

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Bridge play techniques

January 13th, 2009

Terence Reese, a prolific author of bridge books, points out that there are only four ways of taking a trick by force, and two of these are very easy:

playing a high card that no one else can beat
trumping an opponent’s high card
establishing long cards (the last cards in a suit will take tricks if [...]

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Bridge Game Strategy

November 30th, 2008

Bidding systems and conventions
Much complexity in bridge arises from the difficulty of successfully arriving at a good final contract in the auction. This is a fundamentally difficult problem: the two players in a partnership must try to communicate enough information about their hands to ultimately arrive at a makeable contract, but [...]

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Bridge tournaments

November 26th, 2008

At its core, bridge is a game of skill played with randomly dealt cards, which makes each deal a game of chance. Despite this, chance can be largely eliminated by comparing pairs’ results in identical situations. This is achievable when there are eight or more players, sitting at several tables, and [...]

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History of the bridge game

November 21st, 2008

Trick-taking games can be traced back to the early 16th century. Whist became the dominant form, and enjoyed a loyal following for centuries.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word bridge is the English pronunciation of “biritch”, an older name of the game of uncertain origin; the oldest known rule book, from [...]

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Bridge game play

November 13th, 2008

Two partnerships of two players each are needed to play bridge. The four players sit around a table with partners opposite one another. The compass directions are often used to refer to the four players, aligned with their seating pattern. Thus, South and North form one partnership and East and West [...]

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Bridge

November 1st, 2008

Players: 4
Age range: recommended for 12 and up
Setup time < 2 minutes
Playing time: WBF tournament games = 7.5 minutes per deal
Rules complexity; Medium
Strategy depth: High
Random chance: Low – high depending on variant played
Skills required: Memory, Tactics
Contract bridge, usually known simply as bridge, is a trick-taking card game of skill, and partly of chance, for four [...]

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Bourré

October 18th, 2008

Bourré (also commonly known as Bouré and Boo-Ray) is a trick-taking gambling card game primarily played in the Acadiana region of Louisiana in the United States of America. The game’s closest relatives are probably Spades and Poker; like many regional games, Bourré sports a large number of variant rules for both [...]

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Liar’s poker

October 2nd, 2008

Liar’s poker is a bar game that combines statistical reasoning with bluffing, and is played with the eight-digit serial number on a dollar bill. Normally the game is played with a stack of random bills obtained from the cash register.The object is to make the highest bid of a number that does [...]

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Playing cards today

September 16th, 2008

Anglo-American
The primary deck of fifty-two playing cards in use today, called Anglo-American playing cards, includes thirteen ranks of each of the four French suits, spades (♠), hearts (♥), diamonds (♦) and clubs (♣), with reversible Rouennais court cards. Each suit includes an ace, depicting a single symbol of its [...]

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History of playing cards

August 31st, 2008

Early history
The origin of playing cards is obscure, but it is almost certain that they began in China after the invention of paper. Ancient Chinese “money cards” have four “suits”: coins (or cash), strings of coins (which may have been misinterpreted as sticks from crude drawings), myriads of strings, and tens of [...]

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