The Penguin Book of Card Games: Everything You Need to Know to Play Over 250 Games (185 page)

Failing a brelan, the hand with the best point wins. For this

purpose, al four players reveal their hands, including those who

folded. The face values of al these cards are total ed for each suit,

folded. The face values of al these cards are total ed for each suit,

counting Ace 11, courts 10, numerals as marked. The suit with the

highest visible total is designated the best suit, and the player

holding the highest card of it wins the pot – provided that he did

not fold. If he did, the winner is the player holding the greatest

face-value of cards in any other suit.

Related vying games

Best, Flush, and Thirty-One

(Bel e, Flux, et Trente-un). A French and German game of the

sevententh-eighteenth centuries, resembling Poch, but played

without a staking board and with three cards each, one of them

dealt face up. The three stakes were won for, respectively, being

dealt the highest upcard (bel e), vying as to who held the best two-

or three-card flush, and drawing cards up to 31 in the manner of

Pontoon/Blackjack.

Brelan

Classic French vying game widely played from the seventeenth to

the nineteenth centuries, but nowhere unambiguously described.

From two to five players received three cards each from a pack of

24, 28, 32 or 36, and the next card was turned from stock. The best

hand was a brelan carre, being four of a kind made with the aid of

the retourne, fol owed by a simple brelan or prial.

Flush

The flush element of European vying games goes back to a

The flush element of European vying games goes back to a

fifteenth-sixteenth century game of probable Italian origin, variously

known as Flusso, Frusso, Flux, Fluxus, Fluss, etc. After staking,

players received three cards each and vied as to who held the

greatest value of cards in a single suit. Courts counted 10 each and

Ace original y 1, subsequently 11, giving a maximum of thirty-one.

Flüsslen

Of several descendants of Flusso surviving in Switzerland, Flusslen

is local to Muotatal. Four play in partnerships, using a 20-card Jass

pack consisting of Ace, King, Ober, Unter, Banner in each of the

suits acorns, bel s, shields, flowers. Deal three each. One member of

the partnership on lead puts out a two-card flush, but does not turn

the third card until the others have tried to beat it with a bet er

two- or three-card flush. The Unter or Banner of acorns counts 11

points, of bel s 101/2, of shields 101/4, of flowers ‘ten-and-a-bit.

Aces count 11, and Kings and Obers 10 each, but only in

combination with one or two other cards of the same suit. Three

Aces count as a Fli ss worth 33, thus beating everything.

Gilet

Old French game variously spelt Ge, J’ai, Je lai, Gilet, Gil et, and, in

Cardano’s Latin text, Geleus. It looks ancestral to Best, Flush, and

Thirty-One. Put up two stakes and deal three each, face down, from

a 36- or 32-card pack. The first goes to the winner of vying for the

best tricon (triplet) or ge (pair), the second of vying for the best

point, meaning the total value of cards in any one suit. The 1777

Academie des Jeux says that a pair of Aces counts 20 1/2 for point,

and an Ace and same-suit court card or Ten count 211/2, whether

or not the third card is an Ace. Make of this what you wil .

Giley

A Spanish Gypsy game, according to Fournier’s Juegos de Naipes

Espan-oles. Four or five play, to the right, with a 28-card pack

counting as fol ows:

rank Ace King Caballo Sota Three Two Seven

count 11 10 10

10 10

10 7

The winning hand is the highest flush-point on four cards. A four-

card flush ranges in value from 37 to 41, a three-card from 27 to

31, a two-card from 17 to 21. Play to the right. Deal two each in

ones, fol owed by a Poker-style bet ing interval, then two more,

fol owed by another interval, fol owed by a Poker-style draw and a

final bet ing interval. Tied hands at a showdown are broken in

favour of the eldest player. Some circles acknowledge a best suit,

typical y oros, which beats an equal point in an ordinary suit. Some

rank al suits in descending order oros, copas, espados, bastos

(equivalent to - - - ).

Golfo

A Spanish vying game comparable to Gilet but more subtle. Four

play, to the right, with a 28-card pack consisting only of numerals

Three to Nine inclusive. Each in turn deals but sits out, so only

three actual y vie. The winning hand is the highest-counting flush of

up to four cards out of five, which is to say that only two, three, or

four of a suit can be counted even if you have five. A higher-

counting flush beats a lower, even if it contains fewer cards. The

structure is: deal two each, bet, deal three more each, bet, discard

and draw, bet, discard and draw again, final bet. Equality in a

showdown favours the eldest player. Thus you cannot possibly lose

if, as eldest hand, you hold 6-7-8-9 of a suit, counting 30, the

highest possible.

Poque(Bog)

The seventeenth-eighteenth century French equivalent of Poch,

revived in the nineteenth century under the name Bog. The word

Poque, related to poche (pocket), also means a staking

compartment in the gaming board. The French equivalent of Ich

poche, recorded as Je poque, may suggest that ‘poker’ was

original y pronounced ‘pocker’.

Trentnen (Träntnen, Trenta)

This even more elaborate Swiss relative of Flusslen is played in

Appenzel . The procedure is similar, except that each player

discards one card, so that only two-card flushes count, and partners

may indicate the nature of their hand to each other by means of

conventional nods, winks and grimaces.

Don’t forget…

Play to the left (clockwise) unless otherwise stated.

Eldest or Forehand means the player to the left of the dealer

in left-handed games, to the right in right-handed games.

T = Ten, p = players, pp = in fixed partnerships, c = cards,

† = trump,

= Joker.

23 Banking games

[Bragadin] gave Casanova two sound pieces of advice – only to play for cash;

and never to punt, only bank.

John Masters, Casanova (1969)

A banking game is a form of gambling in which one or more

punters simultaneously play a two-handed game against a banker.

The banker deals the cards and general y operates the knobs and

leversof play, while the punters, in most cases, have nothing to do

but decide how much they want to lose. The banker enjoys a

number of advantages, notably that of winning in the event of a tie.

Such advantages constitute his ‘edge’, which can in many cases be

calculated as a long-run percentage in the banker’s favour. Another

characteristic is the fact that many such games require the provision

of a bet ing table marked with a staking layout equivalent to that

used in roulet e, and, to save time and labour, are played with

several packs shuf led together and dealt from a long oblong box

cal ed a shoe. This makes banking games ideal activities for casinos,

in which the bank is held by the management and the game dealt

and control ed by its agents. Casinos, in turn, make ideal sources of

revenue for otherwise impecunious political entities. Cardinal

Mazarin is said to have turned the seventeenth-century French court

at Versail es into one vast casino, virtual y operating it as an

instrument of state, and to this example the principality of Monte

Carlo provides a modern paral el.

Thus banking games are not so much card games as casino games

that happen to be played with cards, the casino itself supplying the

equipment, funding the bank, and, through its agents (croupiers)

equipment, funding the bank, and, through its agents (croupiers)

general y running the show. A detailed description of banking

games therefore belongs not in a book of card games but in a

bookof casino games. Here, we can safely restrict ourselves to those

that can be played anywhere, of the cuf , with a single pack of

cards and no special equipment, and for what many regard as the

fun of a mild flut er, if indeed they bother to play for cash at al .

Structural y, banking games are lit le more than dice games

adapted to the medium of cards, as shown by the fact that they are

fast, defensive rather than of ensive, and essential y numerical, suits

being often irrelevant. They are divisible into two broad classes:

turn-up games, in which punters more or less bet on whether

or not one card wil turn up before another, and stakes are