How to Use the Counter in Pinochle

Video Transcript

"That's pretty good stuff. He's on the lead and now he is going to try to catch some points with hearts and this is going to go low and you're going to have to play low and I'm his partner so I obviously if I have a counter, which I probably do in hearts, I give him a counter. So back and forth the hand goes, back and forth. We don't need to try to play out all 20 cards. What I'm going to try to do in this hand, strategy, I'm going to try to get rid of these side suits, maneuver the hand so that I have diamonds. What are the opponents going to do? They are going to try to leave spades, they're going to try to keep punching my trump and they're going to try to weaken my trump, hoping that these guys will get the chance to take a few more of these. When the dust settles and I'll just do one of this okay? When the dust settles you are going to have a big old stack of stuff here and basically the partners are going to combine their stuff together and now what we are going to do is count the counters okay? There's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty one and twenty two. Hallelujah! We've taken twenty two counters and that means if we had twenty meld or more we would get credit for that plus twenty two fat juicy counters. They have taken twenty eight and chances are they've made their bid but if they needed 30 and we took 22 we're set. Principles covered - you have to climb, you have to trump, if somebody plays a higher trump and you don't have any you have to under trump. I suggest that you read those rules because they're going to be very important to avoid getting penalized."