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Grand Prix TournamentsThe classic card game guide: rules, strategy and tournament play

Suite 01 · Game Rules

Game rules for the classic trick-taking games

Complete rules for Euchre, partnership Pinochle and Spades: the deck, the deal, making trump, the bowers, nil bids and the score that ends the game.

Four hands of playing cards laid around a green felt table beside a brass dealer button and a small stack of chips

Every argument at a card table is a rules argument, and almost every rules argument dies the moment someone reads the standard game calmly from the deal onward. This suite does exactly that for the three games that anchor American tournament play: Euchre and its bowers, partnership Pinochle and its meld count, Spades and its nil bids. Each guide follows the same order a real evening follows: what deck you need, how the cards go out, how trump or the contract is set, how the tricks are played, and what the score does next.

The guides stick to the published standard game and say so when a popular house variant disagrees. Where a table must choose, the guide says which choice the tournaments make, so the house rule is a decision instead of a discovery.

In this suite

  1. Twenty four card euchre deck being dealt in pairs across a green felt table with the turned card face up beside the dealer

    Euchre rules: the 24 card game played right

    Euchre is the fastest partnership trick game in the American parlor, and nearly every dispute at the table dissolves once the standard game is laid out deal by deal.

  2. Pinochle hand of twelve cards fanned on green felt showing paired ranks of a 48 card deck beside a paper bid pad

    Pinochle rules: partnership auction pinochle

    Pinochle looks intimidating for one round of bidding, then reveals itself as the most arithmetic-friendly game in the parlor: count meld, count tricks, make the bid.

  3. Thirteen card spades hand beside a written partnership bid of four on a score sheet with a small brass token on green felt

    Spades rules: bids, nil and bags explained

    Spades is the great American partnership bid game: thirteen tricks, spades always trump, and a scoring system that punishes greed with bags as surely as it rewards nerve with nil.

Every guide in this suite reads against the Scoring & Sheets arithmetic, and two neighbouring suites extend it: Strategy Guides and Tournament Formats.