

Therefore you’ll have two of each card in your deck. That will give you two decks of 24 cards that you combine to make one deck of 48 cards. Take two decks of standard playing cards and strip out the 8’s and down. The basic dynamics of the game remain the same, so we will explain a standard version here. There are many variations, but most of them concern the number of cards or value of melds. The game can be played to a grand total of 1000 points over several hands. Because each player has twelve cards, and the stack will be exhausted after twelve tricks, the play has two very important stages, and the rules and the objectives shift.

The objective is to score points by making melds of certain combinations as set out below, and by winning tricks with valuable cards in them. It has two distinct stages of play, so the objectives and dynamics shift.

Pinochle is a great card game for two players that employs a combination of meld-making and trick taking. In America, however, the game was eagerly embraced and quickly gave rise to a number of variations of which one of them is Pinochle. Bezique was popular in Paris gaming establishments in the 19th century, and appeared briefly in Britain around the 1860s but never really gained in popularity. Pinochle is a derivative of Bezique, a 2 player game of French origin still widely played in Europe.
