How to Use the Counter Cards in Pinochle

Video Transcript

"The basic premise of every card game that I know of is that you must follow suit whenever possible. Failure to follow suit in any card game is called reneging or revoking, revoke is the technical term. In addition to that Pinochle does lay down a few additional standards. A - If it is possible for you to trump an off suit lead you have to trump it. Okay if I am out of clubs and let's say my partner is winning the ace of clubs I have to trump it. It's forced, it is absolutely required and failure to do that constitutes a renege or a revoke. Sorry that's the way it goes. B - Pinochle is unique among many card games, Baraboo has won a couple of exceptions, but Pinochle is unique among many card games in that you are absolutely forced to play the highest card possible. You have to climb and you can't duck. If somebody leads with a queen you can't throw a ten under it if it is the same suit in the next league. Remember you are forced to trump when possible and by the way if you trump and this person is also void in this suit and you play the ace to trump, even though they can't beat that and they have a trump in their hand, they have to under trump. Now that seems kind of sad because in spades you can take discards and in bridge you can take discards but you absolutely have to play the trump. You have to follow suit and if you can trump you have to trump and if somebody else plays the trump and you are out of the suit you have to play a trump. You can't discard in another suit so if you follow those three principles we can look at a typical hand. Let us say that this person over here has declared diamonds. We really don't need to worry about the auction per say we know that they are in a diamond contract. Having declared diamonds they have the right of the opening lead. How are they going to approach this hand? I probably could have given them a better hand. Let's say their partner came up with a killer meld and they wound up going into diamonds okay? What is the plan? You want to maneuver this hand, and I should put this ten over here, you want to maneuver this hand so that you can get down to the end of the hand where all the fat juicy point cards are. If you just try to rip all the trump out and now you are going to be reduced down to this tripe here, king, jack, ten, jack, queen, jack, ten, ten, queen, jack. We'll get it right. You are going to wind up giving up a lot of points at the end. What is the advice for playing the hand as declarer? 1- If you have a short suit that have any aces in it you want to get them out of the way. This is not a short suit; this ace is not going to run away, there is no need to get it out of the way. However, if I had the ace of spades I would certainly want to get that out of the way."