Read Ultimate Book of Card Games: The Comprehensive Guide to More Than 350 Games Online
Authors: Scott McNeely
Ultimate Book of Card Games: The Comprehensive Guide to More Than 350 Games (71 page)
After the exchange of cards, the player to the left of the dealer leads any card. Players must follow suit if possible. Tricks are won by the highest card in the leading suit. Trick winners lead the next trick. Scores are tallied after a player wins the fourth and final trick. The winner deals the next hand.
A player may knock once all players are dealt cards. Knocking increases point scores. In response to a knock, other players may fold (drop their cards on the table, face down) and forfeit a token, or accept the challenge and continue play. Traditionally, players must make a snap decision whether to fold or to stay—if players hesitate at all, they are in. If a player folds on the second knock, she must forfeit two tokens, and three tokens on the third knock, etc. There’s no limit to the number of knocks per hand; the only restriction is that the same player may not knock two times in a row. If a player knocks and all other players fold, the losing players forfeit their tokens as usual, and the winning player deals the next hand.
- DIFFICULTY
:
medium - TIME LENGTH
:
medium - DECKS
: 1
Twenty-Five is one of the most popular card games in Ireland. Once you master the novel ranking of cards within the suits, the game is easy enough to play and is highly dependent on the luck of the draw. Twenty-Five is part of a family of Irish-descended games called “Spoil Five”; try Auction Forty-Five if you enjoy this general concept but prefer games of skill to games of (mostly) luck.
NUMBER OF PLAYERS
3 to 9
HOW TO DEAL
Start with a fifty-two-card deck, and deal five cards to each player in batches of 3-2. The dealer turns up the top card, and this card’s suit is trump for the hand. Confusingly, the card rankings vary based on whether the suit is trump or not:
NON-TRUMP SUITS (HIGH TO LOW)
Clubs & Spades: K-Q-J-A-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10
Diamonds: K-Q-J-10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-A
Hearts: K-Q-J-10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2.
TRUMP SUITS (HIGH TO LOW)
Clubs & Spades: 5-J-A of hearts-A-K-Q-2-3-4-6-7-8-9-10
Diamonds: 5-J-A of hearts-A-K-Q-10-9-8-7-6-4-3-2
Hearts: 5-J-A-K-Q-10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2
Note that A of hearts is always the third-highest trump.
SCORING
Each trick taken is worth 5 points. The first player to score 25 points wins immediately. Games are typically played for a small stake (say, each player contributes 25 cents). If a player scores 25 points and no other player has won a single trick, the stake is usually doubled.
HOW TO PLAY
Once trump is established, any player holding the ace of trump may exchange
any card
in his hand for the turned-up card.
The player to the left of the dealer leads. Tricks are won by the highest trump played or, if none, by the highest card of the leading suit. Players are generally required to follow suit, though you may play trump at any time. If you cannot follow suit, you may play any card. When trumps are led, however, players must follow suit. The one exception is if you’re holding only the top three trump cards—in Twenty-Five you are never forced to play the top three trump cards unless a player has led a higher trump.
VARIATION: FIFTY-FIVE
This variant is less about luck of the draw and more about skillful bidding. The rules are exactly as in the main game, but deal an extra hand at the start. This goes to the player who wins the bidding.
Bidding always starts with the player to the left of the dealer. Players may bid or pass, and once you pass you may not jump back into the bidding. The only valid bids are 10, 15, 20, 25, 60. A dealer may equal the previous bid and win; all other players must increase the previous bid.
The bid winner takes the extra cards into her hand, discards any five cards, and nominates the trump suit. Tricks are still worth 5 points, and whichever player captures the ace of trump earns an extra 5 points.
If the bid winner meets or exceeds her bid, she scores the bid amount and nothing more (though she is eligible for the 5-point high trump bonus). Otherwise, the bid amount is deducted form her score. The first player to score 55 points wins; if the bid winner crosses 55 points first, the round must still be played out to see if she meets her bid or not. If more than one player earns 55 points in the same hand, the player to score it first wins.
Some of the games covered in the
Ultimate Book of Card Games
have multi-player variations. Here’s a complete list:
Betting Games
SOME SAY POKER WAS INVENTED IN CHINA and introduced to the West by Marco Polo. Others claim it’s derived from a seventeenth-century Persian game called As Nas. A more likely link is Poque, a French betting game based on a four-suit deck of hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs. Poque was introduced into the Louisiana territories by French settlers; by the early 1800s, a new game called Poker was all the rage in New Orleans. The rest, as they say, is history.
For most of the twentieth century, Stud Poker (both five- and seven-card) was the most common and popular form of the game. In the 1990s, all this changed with the invention of the in-table television camera. Previously Poker was not a telegenic sport. After the in-table camera came along, millions of home viewers began watching professional players bluff and swagger in real time. And the games in which the most money was at stake, notably No-Limit Texas Hold’em, exploded in popularity.
If you’re new to poker, the basic concept goes like this: All players are dealt a certain number of cards, with which they attempt to make the best hand according to the rules of the game being played. In each game there is a single
dealer
, who shuffles and distributes cards to all players. Most games may be played with a minimum of three and a maximum of seven or eight players. Dealing is done one card at a time, starting to the left of the dealer and proceeding clockwise. The number of cards dealt depends on the game.
All poker games feature one or more
rounds of betting
, in which players declare how much money they’re willing to wager on their cards. To complete the bet, players must put a corresponding number of
chips
into a
pot
. Poker chips are not mandatory, but they’re useful if you are not comfortable playing with cash.
The value of the pot changes with each hand, depending on the number of players and the amounts being bet. In almost every hand, one or more players will
fold
, which is a nice way of saying they are out of the hand from that point on.
If a player makes a bet no other player will match, that player wins the pot and is not required to show his or her cards to anyone. Many of these bets are usually
bluffs
(making a bet with bad cards, in hopes that other players will fold). Bluffing requires patience, guts, and the ability to fool other players into thinking you have an unbeatable hand.
Once all players receive the correct amount of cards and complete the required rounds of betting, a winner is decided in a
showdown
. No guns or knives, please; simply show your cards and determine who has the best hand according to the rules of the game. The pot goes to the winner (or winners, in split-pot games).
HAND RANKINGS
There are fifty-two cards in standard poker decks, plus two jokers that are generally unused. In most poker games, players compete
to have the best five-card hand. The definition of “best” varies from game to game. The method of ranking cards, however, is almost always measured against the following list, which is ordered lowest to highest in value:
HIGH CARD
The highest card in a hand of unrelated cards (A-J-6-4-3 beats K-Q-5-3-2 because the ace is higher than the king).
