Determine How Many Counters You Need in Pinochle

Video Transcript

"How many counters do we need? The different between 50 and 30 is 20. All we need is 20 cheapo, chinsey counters. If we have taken the bid and aimed to trump and we have 30 meld between us the odds are that we should be able to make 20 counters and if we don't too bad. Okay. I will give you one more illustrative example. We have bid 70 okay? We have 30 meld. That's not good because if we take 70 minus 30 away. We need 40 counters and that does not look good. Unless this 70 was based on some incredible trump suit the chances of pulling 40 out of 50 counters is mighty thin hence that is the risk of getting up into that territory. Scoring, we score points in each hand for counters we take, meld in our bid. Now if we took for example 40 counters, what do we get here? We get 40 plus 30 and we see that bid at 20 so our net score is 70. That's basically in a progressive system, if you are playing a subtraction system and we happen to take 40 counters and we set the opponents we are going to get their points as well. Remember again the correlation between counters and meld must equal or exceed bid."