Bids of 52 in Pinochle

Video Transcript

"O'kay continuing on talking about bidding and again I can't emphasize enough that bidding is the most important part of the game. It is the most important part of the game in so many games besides Pinochle but if you make the wrong bid and you get into the wrong contract you are often going to be set before you even get out of the gate so if you don't have the right bid and you don't have the right bidding sequence you are going to be in an awful lot of trouble. Okay we are talking about bids of 52 and bids of 53. You open with 52 and you are showing that you have 20 meld. The meld can be a run and queens all around; it could be anything, anything that makes 20. Does it have to be exactly 20? Well you can shade it to 19 but then maybe you want a good looking 19 hand to be shaded to 18. Well I'm going to tell you these points are critical. One or 2 points can be the difference in making board or making meld and getting set so if you can shade it down a point that's fine I won't fuss about it particularly if you have something like aces all around but if you have a weak meld that is consisting say of a run of a trump suit and queens all around that's 21 points but if it is jacks all around, that's only 4 points and that is 19 points, that is weak. Therefore try to make the bid accurate. If you don't have 20 then don't show a 20 meld or you really shade it by one point. Same thing with 30 if you don't have 30 don't shade it to 27. I think your partner would be better pleased hearing you do 20 meld and then he's going on that and then you show up with 7 extra meld for him he's going to say that's great, that takes the pressure off of us particularly when you start getting up in the 60's. So bid the 52 to show 50. The same thing with 53, 30 meld is 30 meld. Now the only problem with the 30 meld bid is what if you have Pinochles? Of course if you look at the meld chart that I had before you will clearly see that if you have 30 points in Pinochles or say triple Pinochles you are going to be in an awful lot of trouble so Pinochle bids that have jacks of diamonds and queens of spades are inherently weaker and they're different not power hands or a particular power meld. So you might want to consider what to do in that instance if you have say the double Pinochle for 30, that just dilutes your hand a little bit in power, 30 meld, however, is very important I can say that but try to follow the table and work with whatever system is most comfortable for you."