Pinochle

The rules change halfway through the hand, and that is the whole game

Almost every trick game has one rule about what you may play: follow suit if you can. Pinochle has two, and it swaps between them mid-hand, which is why people who already play cards bounce off it hardest.

While the stock lasts — the first twelve tricks — nothing is forced. Any card may be played to any lead. You are not choosing how to win the trick; you are choosing what to keep, because winning a trick buys the right to lay down a meld and the melds are where the score is.

Once the stock is empty the rule becomes follow suit and win the trick if you can. Holding cards of the led suit you must play one — and if any of them beats the card currently winning, you must play one of those. You may not duck. Void in the led suit, you must trump; if the trick is already trumped, you must overtrump if you can. That is a much stronger obligation than the one you know from spades or hearts, and an engine that returns "any card of the led suit" is wrong in a way that never throws an error — it just quietly lets somebody hoard an ace while a ten walks off with the trick.

So the same hand, facing the same lead, has two different legal sets depending on which half of the hand you are in. Every free pinochle site answers that by greying a card out. This board writes the sentence: “♥ led and you hold hearts, so you follow — and pinochle makes you WIN if you can. Only these do it: ♥A · ♥10.” It is above your cards on every single turn, and it changes the moment the stock runs dry.

When the stock runs out, pinochle stops being a game of hidden information

This is a fact about two-handed pinochle that we have not seen a single pinochle product use, and it is not subtle once you see it. At the end of the stock phase there are 48 cards and exactly three places they can be: your twelve, the twenty-four lying in the two trick piles, and their twelve. Subtract the first two from the deck and what remains is their hand. No inference, no probability, no reading of tells — arithmetic.

Every experienced pinochle player does some version of this in their head, and it is the single biggest gap between someone on their tenth hand and someone on their thousandth. So this table does the subtraction and prints it: their remaining cards, by suit, updated as each one is played. It is computed from the trick piles rather than by reading the opponent's cards, it never appears while the stock is alive — because then the unseen cards are their hand plus the undealt stock and nothing separates the two — and there is a tick box to turn it off if you would rather count for yourself.

Our Sharp opponent does exactly the same subtraction from its side of the table. That is not an engine and it is not a lookahead: it leads cards you provably cannot beat and wins tricks as cheaply as the rules let it. It is playing with the information you have, which is the only kind of hard opponent worth losing to.

The meld table, and the rule that makes it interesting

Meld is scored by laying cards face up during the stock phase, and the same cards then have to be played for trick points — laying a meld does not spend it, it publishes it. On the single deck:

• Class A, the trump melds: a run in trump (A-10-K-Q-J) is 150, a royal marriage (K-Q of trump) 40, a marriage in any plain suit 20, the dix — the nine of trump — 10 each.
• Class B, the meld the game is named for: a pinochle is the jack of diamonds with the queen of spades, and it is worth 40. Not any jack and queen, not the other colour pair. Double pinochle is 300.
• Class C, “around”: one of a rank in every suit — four aces 100, kings 80, queens 60, jacks 40.

The rule that makes this worth thinking about: a card may be counted in melds of different classes, but never twice in the same class. With spades trump, one queen of spades scores in all three at once — royal marriage 40, pinochle 40, queens around 60, a hundred and forty points off a single card. And yet two kings of spades with one queen is still one royal marriage, because the second marriage needs a second queen. The rail on this page lists every meld your hand actually contains, live, with what each one pays, so you are choosing between real options rather than trying to remember a table.

Two more that catch people. The run swallows its own royal marriage: A-10-K-Q-J of trump is 150, not 190, because that K and Q are already spent inside a class-A meld. And five, six or seven aces score exactly what four do — there is no partial credit, and the double needs all eight.

Two of every card, and the tie rule that follows

A pinochle deck has two copies of every card, so two identical cards landing in one trick is an ordinary event rather than a corner case. The card played first wins it. The consequence people find backwards is that the second ace cannot win — so in the playout, where you are obliged to beat the winning card if you can, you are not obliged to play it, because it does not beat anything. The board says so on the table when it happens.

How the deal is kept honest

The loudest complaint about every free card site is that the computer cheats. We cannot argue you out of that, so we made it checkable. Before the first card moves, the page publishes the SHA-256 hash of a master seed you cannot see. Every hand is shuffled from SHA-256(master : hand number) mixed with a client seed you can set yourself. Each hand's seed is released the moment that hand is scored; the master is released when the game ends, and hashing it must give you the commitment that was on screen before hand one.

The limit of that claim, stated rather than left to be read as more: it proves the deals were fixed in advance, not chosen as the game went along. It does not prove the master seed itself was drawn fairly. That question is answered by a different fact — there is no server in this game at all, the shuffle happens in your browser, and the seed comes from your own window.crypto. The arithmetic is written out on the fairness page.

Which pinochle this is, and which it is not

Pinochle is three games sharing a name, and the differences are not cosmetic. This is two-handed pinochle: one 48-card deck, two players, twelve cards each, trump from a turned-up card, melding during the stock phase, then a strict twelve-trick playout, game to 1,000. It is the two-player game Hoyle, Pagat and the Bicycle rule sheet all print first.

Not implemented, and named so you are not surprised: four-handed partnership (auction) pinochle, which adds a bid, a pass of cards to the bid winner, all meld laid down before a card is played and a contract that can be set; and double-deck pinochle, which is 80 cards, four players and a meld table whose values are genuinely different from the ones above. Both have real demand and neither is here yet. Also absent: the roundhouse, and any bidding of any kind.

Where our engine's limits are, stated plainly

The rules are checked against a suite that reproduces the published meld table cell by cell from four agreeing sources, walks all 86,565,372 meld vectors of the deck, and proves that scores of 760 and 770 are unreachable. What no test can establish is the table itself — that a run “should” be 150 is a convention, not a computed quantity, so those values are taken on authority and everything downstream of them is derived and asserted.

And four cells of it are genuinely disputed, which we would rather show than smooth over. The familiar “thousand aces” table gives eight aces 1,000, eight kings 800, eight queens 600 and eight jacks 400. Pagat's page for two-handed pinochle specifically says the opposite: that double pinochle is the only meld with a bonus for having two, and everything else simply counts twice — 200, 160, 120, 80. Bicycle does not print the double-around melds at all. We keep the familiar table as the default so nothing changes under anyone silently, and the engine carries the other reading as a named option tested in both positions. What we have not done is quietly pick one and call it verified.

The bot is honest about being a bot. Pip plays a legal card at random. Dix keeps its melds together, takes tricks that carry counters and takes them when there is meld waiting to be laid. Sharp is Dix plus the count described above. None of them searches, none of them models what you are holding during the stock phase, and none of them will out-calculate a good club player. There is also no live play against another person yet — three levels of computer opponent and nothing else — which is a real gap rather than a design position, and it is the first thing we would add.

Common questions

Do I have to follow suit in pinochle?

Not while the stock lasts — any card to any lead. Once the stock is empty you must follow suit and beat the winning card if you are able, and trump if you are void. The board tells you which of those you are in on every turn.

Does the ten really beat the king?

Yes. A, 10, K, Q, J, 9. The ten is the second-highest card and worth 10 trick points.

How many points are in a hand?

Exactly 250 in the tricks — 240 in counters (ace 11, ten 10, king 4, queen 3, jack 2, nine 0, twice each in four suits) plus 10 for the last trick. Everything above 250 in a hand came from meld.

Can I play four-handed or double-deck pinochle here?

Not yet. This page is the two-handed game only, and the difference matters enough that we say it in the hero rather than in the small print.

Is there live play against a friend?

Not yet — three computer levels only. Our Hearts and Spades pages do have live rooms.

Is this pinochle really free?

Yes. No signup, no account, no download, no daily limit, no coins and no video between hands.

Pinochle is a public-domain game. This implementation, its table and its engine are original to EveryGameMade. More free classics: canasta · euchre · bridge · the whole arcade.