How to Score a Hand in Pinochle

Video Transcript

"We have established the principles of the game and I certainly hope you take the time to review the meld count, play of the hand, aces and trump management and all that wonderful good stuff. However we need to understand the scoring system in a little bit more detail. We are going to go over to here and I am going to explain to you again just in summary the relationship: 1) there are 50 counters available. We know that counters are aces, kings, and tens. It is really 48 but we will just call it counters so it is 50 points that are out there. 2) 20 meld, if we are declaring the hand we must have a combination of 20 meld. What is 20 meld? It is any combination that we went through, rounds, runs in the suit, ace, king, queen, jack, Pinochles, round houses, whatever makes up the meld, your partner and you absolutely want to make up the meld. If you are defending and you want to save meld you have to have 20 meld. 3) Bidding we have discussed that the bidding goes around in increments starting to the left of the dealer with a call of at least 50 or pass. The key now is how do we make our bid? If our bid is 50 and we have 30 meld, and somebody decided to go 50, pass, pass, and pass. This is the bare bones minimum bid that you are going to get away with. You rarely see 50 whole but we use it as an example. We have bid 50. We have 30 meld between us, right? This is our meld and this is our bid."