Learn About the Round Horse in Pinochle

Video Transcript

"The value of the meld in pinochle, and we're going to go into the specialty combinations. We have a term called a round house. Now that has nothing to do with boxing or anything but, again, for the sake of illustration, let's just look at this hand. I'll take cards out and so forth. We've already determined that we have fifteen point run in spades. We've determined that we have, you know, separate marriages. In the spade marriage, we do not count, because that's contained in the run. But if we had an additional marriage in spades we would get four points for that. Remember four points for a trump marriage. Let's say the opponent was naming diamonds for trump, we would count four points toward our meld count. That's not four points on the score sheet. Its four points towards our meld count. That meld count is so important. Now, if you look at this hand closely, look what we have here. There's a certain amount of symmetry to this, okay. You see that? We have four kings and four queens. Okay. Now if we just had three kings, we didn't have that, well we didn't have the queen of spades. We have to have the queen of spades from that. Say, for the sake of argument, or the sake of comparison, say we only had one, two, three, four different kings, they have to be different ones and only three queens, we wouldn't be able to claim the round house because that's a marriage in every suit. But we could claim a thing called a rounds. For example, we said aces all around gives you ten meld points. Kings all around gives you eight meld points. Queens all around gives you six meld points. And jacks all around give you four meld points. Those are very important. Now we're going to get into this melding stuff later when we get into the intermediate and advanced play. However, if we're gifted enough to have all four marriages, we get twenty-four points. That's called the round house. That's a really great hand. So always look for that. Because that's a big shot of meld and you'll see just how important that is as the game plays out."