Learn About Nullos in Barbu

Series Summary

Playing cards date back to ancient China, where they are believed to have originated, when paper currency was both the vehicle for the card games, and the bet. One popular card game that incorporates playing cards is Barbu. Barbu is a trick-taking card game not dissimilar to hearts where players take turns leading sub-games called contracts. Barbu originated in France in the early 20th Century where it was especially popular with university students. Translated, the name means "the bearded man" or simply "the beard", a reference to the king of hearts, a card of special significance in the game.

In this free video series, our expert Joe Andrews will teach you how to play Barbu. He will tell you about nullos, the history of barbu, special cards like queens, the king of hearts, and general hearts. Joe will also teach you the rules of Barbu, all about tricks and trick-taking, and bidding options like the last 2 option and the fan tan option. Joe will teach you about the importance of partnership and how to do the ravage city option before talking about doubling, counting cards, finesse positions, and live vs. internet play.

Video Transcript

"Hi, we'll start the intermediate- advanced section of Barbu, king of hearts by discussing each of the levels in a little bit more detail. And, we start out with the level called nellows. This is a, this is a choice that you have to make and you want to make it when you have a hand that is, has quite a few low cards and you don't expect winning a lot of tricks. Now, we have a couple of illustrative examples here, we can pan down on this hand, o.k. This is a borderline hand that's really not ideal for nellows, because we're looking at a bad clubs suit that's probably going to soak out three tricks. You can rest assured that good opponent is going to let you hold that queen of hearts for a fourth trick. You've got ace, king of spades here, you've got ace of diamonds, you just have an awful lot, even though you've got some nice low cards to get off lead, unfortunately you're going to be saddled with probably six or seven tricks here. So, this might be a good throw away hand, if you needed to, I mean you wouldn't call queens on this, you wouldn't call, you know, king of hearts on this for example, but I would not call a hand like this nellow, it's just too many tricks. But, if we want to look at exhibit B:"