A hand of pinochle
The card you need is in the wrong hand — and the rules won't let you ask for it.
"Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her. But once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game."— Voltaire
Voltaire had it half right. You accept your cards; how you play them is on you. But you are never only playing your own hand — what you can win depends on the cards all around you, and the biggest prizes are the ones you set up together. Pinochle is the cleanest lesson in that I know.
I pick up my twelve cards and there it is, almost — the ten, king, queen, jack and nine of spades. One card short of a run. The ace of spades would finish it, and turn a90-point hand into a 200-point one. One card, 110 points.
The ace is sitting in someone else's hand right now, and to them it is nearly worthless. To me it is 110. My partner might be holding it — and I am not allowed to say a word. You get a bid, which is one number. Then your partner slides you four cards face down. That is the entire conversation.
Tap one — this is what your bid tells your partner.
Tap one — this is what you send back, face down.
Where this sits among all six endings
Look at the spread. The best ending scores 179, the worst scores 121, and the gap between them has nothing to do with card skill. The bottom two endings are the ones where partner had no idea what the bid meant, so they sent their four worst cards and hoped. That one difference — having agreed ahead of time what a bid stands for — is worth about 48 points. Every clever decision after that moves the number by roughly half as much.
Your bid is not really a description of your hand. It is an instruction telling your partner which set of rules to follow. The rules do the talking.
Going for all twelve tricks is a gamble, and the numbers show its shape: emptying a suit costs you meld and costs you average score, and what it buys is moon shots. It only starts paying once you are already holding a pile of trump.
| Spades in hand | Keep all | Empty a suit |
|---|
Below six spades it does nothing at all. At eight it adds more than five points of moon probability. This is why the move feels obviously right to players who go for it and obviously wrong to players who don't — they are describing different hands.
Exact odds on the twelve cards you are dealt.
Single-deck partnership pinochle. Aces, tens and kings count one point each in the play, plus one for the last trick. Branch figures come from 12,000 simulated deals apiece, dealt to hands worth opening the bidding on. The odds in the final table are exact, not simulated.