9/24/2023 1 Comment Double deck pinochle bidding![]() You don’t want to be reckless of course, but bidding and taking hands is generally a good thing. It’s generally good to be aggressive in games, and bidding in Pinochle is the same way. So if you have two holes plus three legs you don’t have that same 50/50 shot you normally would. The reason is because normally there are two of each card you can catch, but in this case there’s only one (because you’ve already got the other in your hand). If you have “three legs”, such as Q♠ Q♠ J ♦, that’s really only half a hole. Oh, and one special case I should mention is double pinochle. The more you play the better you can find that balance point. There’s really no hard and fast rule for that sort of thing you just have to use your judgment and figure out if it’s worth the risk and how high you want to bid. ![]() That often depends on the score and how much meld you’re risking. You have to balance the chance to take the bid and make a hand against the risk of losing your meld if you take it and you’re set. But that example brings up another key point in bidding: the possibility of losing your meld. If you have 100 Aces with a marriage and a pinochle (140 meld) you can figure on 14 or 15 tricks and bid 280 or 290. If you have the entire meld (no hole) you can just skip right to the chart and go from there. Queens can sometimes be better for taking tricks than Kings because the Queens themselves aren’t counters, so you’re not giving one away from your hand every time. It really depends on what other cards you have, what you lay down, how many trump you have, and a lot of other factors, so this is just a rough guideline: Here’s a very rough list of approximately how many tricks particular hands can pick. 12 or 13 tricks is about the most you can expect with 80 Kings in your hand, so that adds an additional 120 or 130 points, meaning we can bid 240 or 250, something like that. If we have 120 meld, how much can we bid? In other words, how many tricks can we pick? That’s something you have to get a feel for after playing for a while. With the 80 Kings we would have a total of 120 meld after calling trump (either Spades or Clubs). So in the previous example hand we would just assume we have the 80 Kings. The rule of thumb is to pretend you’ve filled one of the holes (the lowest scoring one) and bid accordingly. The next step is to figure out how much to bid. So really, you’ve got a slightly better than 50/50 shot, since you’ll get those kinds of lucky breaks once in a while. For example, in the above hand, you might catch 10 ♦ Q ♦ to make a run in Diamonds. In addition, you will occasionally get lucky and hit something you weren’t counting on. So this hand has the required three holes, and we can go ahead and bid it, because we know we have a 50/50 shot of hitting it (or a better hole) in the cat. There are in fact three holes: the A ♥ would make 100 Aces, the 10♣ would make a run in Clubs, and the K♠ would make 80 Kings (you usually only look at the substantial melds, such as 60 Queens or higher, and not marriages). I said try to figure it out…don’t just skip to the answer! □ See if you can figure out how many holes the following hand has:Ī♠ A♠ 10♠ 9♠ 9♠ K ♥ 10 ♥ A♣ K♣ Q♣ J♣ A ♦ K ♦ J ♦ 9 ♦ ![]() A♠ A♣ A ♥ would be another hole, just needing the A ♦ to complete 100 Aces. If you have A♠ 10♠ K♠ Q♠ you just need the J♠ to make a run, so that’s one hole. ![]() A hole is any meld in your hand that is missing one card. The basic bidding strategy revolves around the fact that if you have three “holes” the odds of hitting one in the cat are 50/50. Everyone has slightly different rules of course when we play the game is to 1500 and the person left of the dealer is in (or under) for 200, meaning they have to bid that much to start. The first decision you’ll need to make is what to bid, if anything. Not 4-player, not double deck, not partners, none of that crazy stuff. The most important thing to remember here is that when I talk about “Pinochle” I mean Pinochle. Pinochle is one of the few games where I really feel I’m pretty good at it, so I thought it would be a good subject for my second in-depth look at a game. ![]()
1 Comment
Melinda Landis
10/9/2023 03:41:55 pm
We play double deck pinochle and have a lot of arguments about bidding. Brief example, I have good meld but crappy playing hand, I bid before partner, I bid 54 to tell him I have 40 meld. It gets around to him, one person passes, he bids 55. I pass when it's my turn and he gets the bid. He says that's not how I should do it. I am confused because I thought I was declaring meld to him and he was saying he'd make trump. He says I should have bid 56 to give him a chance to decide. I think if he didn't want it he shouldn't have bid. Because he bid, it seemed like he was okay with making trump. (He made trump, we won the hand, btw) This meld bidding causes a lot of conflict and I can't find any sources that actually tell me what to do, like when this happens, you do this...Playing with people who have all played before but hadn't for some years so we're pretty rusty.
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