Pinochle rules: how to play, bid and count melds

A Pinochle deck looks unusual to anyone used to a standard 52-card pack. It runs 9 through ace in each suit, with two copies of every rank, giving 48 cards total and no cards numbered 2 through 8 at all. The nines are the lowest-ranking card, which surprises a lot of new players expecting them to sit somewhere in the middle.

In the standard 4-player partnership game, the dealer gives each player 12 cards, using up the entire 48-card deck exactly. That even split means there's no widow or kitty in this form, every card in the deck ends up in someone's hand before the bidding starts. A widow does show up in some 2-player and 3-player versions of single-deck Pinochle, where the deal doesn't divide the deck evenly and the leftover cards form a small extra pile the winning bidder picks up. Confirm which form your table is playing before you deal, since the widow rule changes how the bidding and melding phase works.

Bidding for trump

Starting to the dealer's left, players take turns bidding a number of points or passing, with each new bid required to beat the last one. Bidding continues until every other player has passed, and the last bidder standing wins the right to name trump for the hand. That bid is also a promise: the bidder's side needs to reach at least that many combined points between melds and tricks, or the full bid amount is subtracted from their score instead. Bidding to win the right to name trump, rather than just having trump turned up automatically, is a mechanic Pinochle shares with another bidding-and-trump trick game, Euchre, even though the two games arrive at trump in very different ways.

Melding

Once trump is named, every player lays down whatever scoring combinations they're holding, face up on the table, before trick play starts. Melds are built from specific card combinations, a pair of kings and queens in the trump suit, a run of the top five trump cards, and so on, each worth a fixed point value covered in Scoring below. Only combinations shown at this stage count, so a hand full of near-misses that never get displayed on the table scores nothing.

Trick-taking and card values

After melding, players play out the hand one trick at a time, following suit when possible, with trump cards beating any non-trump card played. Only certain cards carry point value when they're won in a trick: ace is worth 11, ten is worth 10, king is worth 4, queen is worth 3, jack is worth 2, and nine is worth nothing at all. Whoever wins the very last trick of the hand also collects a 10-point bonus on top of whatever cards were in it, which is one detail newer players commonly miss when they're adding up the count.

Between the fixed card values above and a fixed 10-point last-trick bonus, a full 48-card hand has exactly 250 points available during trick play. Meld points are added on top of that trick-play total. The table below covers every commonly recognized single-deck meld, from the smallest bonus, the nine of trump, up to the two rare "double" melds that pay far more than simply twice the base value.

Say a bidder's hand includes the king and queen of trump (a royal marriage, worth 40), the queen of spades and jack of diamonds (a pinochle, worth 40), and one jack from each of the four suits (jacks around, worth 40). Laid down together, that's 120 meld points on the table before a single trick is played, on top of whatever card points that hand's tricks bring in afterward.

Holding two separate, different melds, say a royal marriage in trump plus an ordinary marriage in another suit, just adds the two values together like any other pair of melds. The two "double" melds in the table above work differently: doubling every card in a pinochle or in a full trump run doesn't simply double the points, a double pinochle pays 300 rather than 80, and a double run pays 1,500 rather than 300, which is exactly why they're the two melds most worth building a hand around when the cards allow it.

After both melding and trick play are counted, the bidding side checks their combined total against their bid. Meet or beat it, and both the meld and trick points count as scored. Fall short, and the bid amount comes off their score instead, regardless of how many points they actually put on the board that hand.

Double-deck Pinochle is built for a bigger table and changes more than just the card count. The version most commonly cited combines two Pinochle decks with the nines removed, landing on 80 cards total, though some tables play a 96-card version that keeps the nines in, so it's worth confirming which one a group is using before the first hand. Dealt out to the standard 4-player partnership arrangement, that's 20 cards each, another deal that divides the deck exactly and leaves no widow.

The bigger deck changes strategy more than it changes the rules on paper. With twice as many copies of every card in circulation, melds that would be rare in single-deck play, like a double pinochle, come up more often, and trump suits get contested more aggressively during bidding since there's more trump-suit material available for everyone at the table.