Bezique Squares

From around 1920 onwards, the British publisher Foulsham known for their wide range of popular books on games and puzzzles (and for Old Moores Almanack) began printing a booklet called Thirty One Patience Games; Single and Double Pack by Tom King.

                                            (c. 1928)

The book had a preface by Charles Platt called ‘A Brief History of the Pack of Cards’ which was both irrelevant and historically incorrect in almost every single detail. The selection of Patience games does however include a fleeting description of a rarely mentioned variant of Poker Squares called Bezique Squares.

The idea is a simple one. You deal out 25 cards one at a time face upwards, and you place each card somewhere in a 5 x 5 matrix laid out on the table. You may place each card anywhere within the grid pattern, but you are not allowed to move any card once it is placed on the table. Once the 25 card grid is complete, you then score each row and column of the tableau according to whichever scoring system you have chosen to use.

The best known version of this Solitaire is ‘Poker Squares’ which makes use of the rules for ranking Poker hands. There are two different systems American and British. There are however two other versions of this Patience game - ’ Cribbage Squares’  which makes use of the rules of Cribbage for scoring the hand, while ‘Bezique Squares’ uses the standard scoring combinations found in the game of Bezique. The big difference of course is that you need to use the double Piquet pack of 64 cards, when playing Bezique Squares. You also need to remember to turn over a trump card before you start drawing cards.  

The scoring features available in Bezique Squares are:

Four Aces - 100

Four Kings -   80

Four Queens -   60

Four Jacks -   40

Double Bezique - 500

Single Bezique -   40

Trumps  (A.T.K.Q.J) - 250

Trump Marriage (KQ) -   40

Common Marriage         -   20

7 of Trumps -   10

The sample deal below would score:

  500  pts - Double Bezique

  250  pts - Trump Sequence (A.T.K.Q.J)

  100  pts - Four Aces

    80  pts - Four Kings

    60 pts - Four Queens

     40 pts - Four Jacks

     80 pts - Trump Marriages  x 2

     40 pts - Common Marriages  x 2

     20 pts - 7 of Trumps x 2 (1 as turn-up and 1 in tableau)

1170 pts in total

The Curious History of Fildinski

The card game Bezique was first popularised in Britain in 1862. By the end of 1869 it had become a runaway sensation with another nine editions of a popular box set produced in the following year by the well-known London games publisher Charles Goodall under the name of ‘Camden’. It was at this point that something rather interesting happened.

In 1870 another London firm Thomas De La Rue produced a new Bezique box set under the name of ‘Cavendish’, which was the pen-name of a famous authority on Whist whose real name was Henry Jones. 

Henry Jones  (1831 -1899)  -  'Cavendish'

The novelty of this new edition was that it included rules for a significant and unfamiliar variant of the game known variously as ‘Polish Bezique’ or as ‘Fildinski’. The box set included separate rules and player guides for both games, along with a supplementary booklet about both games written by Cavendish. The new ‘Polish Bezique’ received an enthusiastic reception from the British public, and was described as “being much superior in the opinion of many authorities”.  A claim uncritically repeated to this day.

There are several problems with this account of ‘Fildinski’ however. The first is that no-one seemed to be quite certain how to spell it. The eminent Encyclopaedia Britannica misprinted the name as ‘Fildniski’ in several editions, an error perpetuated by a number of other sources as well. The second problem is that ‘Fildinski’ is not a meaningful word in Polish, nor in any other related language.

New card games are not infrequently named after cities or provinces where they first became popular, e.g  Boston, Michigan, Chicago, Klondyke, Yukon, etc. The problem is that there appears to be nowhere in the world named Fildinski. Nor does it exist as a proper name of a distinguished figure that could have become attached to a popular card game in the way that Napoleon (Nap) did.

More worryingly, I can find no trace of Fildinski or Polish Bezique being mentioned or played anywhere else in the world before 1870, when ‘Cavendish’ proudly introduced it to the world as a new discovery. The very earliest reference I can find is an acquisition record in the British Library - shelfmark Mic.A. 11518(4) for the printed rules of ‘Royal Besique’ by ‘Fildinski’.  The record which is dated to 1870 has a curator’s notation indicating that it had been entered into the collection “Presumably for Copyright”.

At this point i will say outright that Fildinski is most likely a made-up name for a variation that was invented by Cavendish himself. There was no ‘Polish Bezique’ in existence before he created it out of thin air and lent his name to the deception in order to create a new commercial opportunity for Thomas De La Rue the publishers and himself.

Why did Cavendish not simply take the credit for inventing this new version of Bezique himself, and dispense with this ludicrous rigmarole of creating a cod-attribution for it? There are two possible answers. The first is that Henry Jones (1831-1899) was in real life a distinguished doctor and MRCS (like his father before him). Apart from writing about Whist and Billiards, he was also a keen Croquet player and a committee member of the All England Croquet Club at Wimbeldon. In 1875 Henry Jones made the radical suggestion that one of the club’s Croquet lawns should be set aside for playing Lawn Tennis - a suggestion which led two years later in 1877 to the first inaugural Wimbledon Lawn Tennis tournament. So he was a serious man with a professional sense of gravitas, who preferred to maintain a certain distance between his public persona as a writer on popular card games, and his professional career as a doctor.

A second reason might be that Bezique for all it’s new-found popularity in the respectable drawing-rooms of Victorian Britain actually had some distinctly louche and unsavoury associations. It was a game that had originally become popular among the courtesans of the theatrical demi-monde in Paris. It was also played as a high stakes gambling game in the racier salons and up-market bordellos patronised by Edward the Prince of Wales, and his younger brother Alfred The Duke of Edinburgh during their playboy escapades in Paris. Alfred was in fact the member of the royal family who first lent his name to Bezique and helped popularise it in Britain from 1866 onwards. Henry Jones as a morally conservative and high-minded member of the establishment may well have chosen to insulate himself from these associations with some extra care.

In general, ‘Cavendish’ was invariably an interpreter of games, rather than an innovator. In his writings on Whist for example, he always sought to codify and document best practice, rather than to reinvent it. I can well imagine that he probably found Bezique to be illogical, flippant, and not much to his taste when it first became popular in Britain. You can see Henry Jones sitting in his card clubs playing through hands of Bezique and wondering how the game could possibly be improved, and put on a more logical footing for serious-minded players like himself. At some point he probably conceived of a radical inversion of the rules of Bezique whereby declarations were to be made from cards already won in tricks, rather than from cards in your hand that were waiting to be played to tricks. The problem was how to promote this new invention ? My suggestion is that Henry Jones and his publisher hit on the idea of inventing an entirely specious name and precedent for it, and voilà ! ‘Fildinski’ aka ‘Polish Bezique' was born.

Fildinski is even less commonly played nowadays than Bezique, even by connoisseurs and historians. In all honesty it feels like a completely different game from Bezique when you attempt to play it, and it can only have been the reputation of Cavendish that persuaded players of his era otherwise. Conceiveably the publisher Thomas De La Rue wanted to bring Cavendish on board for the 1870 edition of their new Bezique box-set because he was the most pre-eminent writer on Whist and Piquet at that time. Perhaps Henry Jones only agreed to lend the authority of his pen-name ‘Cavendish’ to this project on the proviso that he was to be allowed to smuggle his own new invention ‘Fildinski’ into the package. And the quid-pro-quo agreed on was that it would be passed off as an established variation from Poland ? That at least seems to be the best explanation available to me now.

Thomas De La Rue Box Set  "Bezique And Polish Bezique" with notes by Cavendish c.1870.

  Bezique

La Partie de Bésigue -Gustave Caillebotte 1880

 Bezique - History

Bezique was originally a French card game called Besigue, a member of a large family of earlier ‘trick and marriage’ melding games such as Marjolet, Briscan and Cinq-Cent. It had become a popular pastime in the fashionable gaming halls of Paris by the 1860s. Some sources say the earliest version of the game known as Besi or Bezy came from the Limousin area of South-West France in the early 1820s, and that it reached Paris about twenty years later. The game maintained a strong hold In France throughout the Second Empire and well into the period of the Third Republic. The French novelist Emile Zola discovered while researching his novel Nana (1880), that courtesans and actresses of the Parisian theatrical demi-monde in which Nana is set still liked to fit a game of Bezique after lunch into their busy schedules.

David Parlett in his History of Card Games (OUP-1991) notes that the introduction of Bezique into Britain is unusually well documented. William Pole writing in the December 1861 edition of Macmillans Magazine recommended Bezique as the third and newest of three card games for readers to amuse themselves with over the Christmas period (The other two were the older games of Quadrille and Piquet which Pole conceded were ‘both much out of mode’ but deemed eminently worthy of revival). Pole actually referred to the game as Basique which was a more common spelling at first, before Bezique was adopted as the standard name in Britain.

Bezique was documented again in Geoffrey Pardon’s 1863 ediiton of Hoyles Games Modernised, and later the same year a small monograph on ‘Besique’ attributed to J.R.W also appeared in print. The introduction to the latter credits the patronage of H.R.H. Lord Alfred the Duke of Edinburgh and second son of Queen Victoria as having been influential in establishing the popularity of Bezique in England. In much the same way that his father Albert’s interest in playing Patience, and his mother Queen Victoria’s passing interest in playing the new American game of Poker helped to establish a vogue for these in polite society, so Lord Alfred’s taste for the new game he had discovered in the salons of Paris helped to establish a fashion for playing Bezique in the drawing rooms of Britain as well.

The London firm of Charles Goodall began producing luxury box-set editions of cards and markers for ‘The Royal Game of Bezique’ in 1868 complete with a rule book credited to ‘Camden’ with an endorsement saying ‘Patronised By His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh’. A second edition was published in 1869, and the company were already up to a tenth edition by the end of 1870 which indicated quite how popular this box-set had become.

Berkley writing in 1901 says that the game had caught on by 1869, and the well known authority on Whist ‘Cavendish’ (Henry Jones) produced a monograph on Bezique in 1870 that rapidly went into a second printing. Not everyone was pleased with the new game however. Lord Aldenham writing in the Westminster Papers in 1870 dismisses Bezique as “that slowest of slow games” and tried to promote his own long-standing idiosyncratic interest in reviving the old game of Ombre at the expense of the new fad for Bezique.

Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) the author of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through The Looking-glass published a poem called  The Three Voices (21st November 1869) which includes the verse

He felt it was his turn to speak,

And, with a shamed and crimson cheek,

Moaned "This is harder than Bezique!"

which once again chimes with the year of 1869 being the one by which Bezique had found a popular following in Britain.

Bezique which was originally a game for two played with a 64 card deck soon began to evolve more complex versions. In 1880 the Paris card clubs agreed upon a new set of rules for a four pack version known as Bezique Japonais, and the English Portland club followed suit in 1887 but renamed it Rubicon Bezique. A six pack version known as Chinese Bezique was created in 1899 and an eight pack version followed a year or so later. A three handed version played with three decks was known by 1890, as was a version known as Fildinski or ‘Polish Bezique’. The latter had become so popular in Britain that Thomas De La Rue began producing box sets of Bezique with printed rules and markers for both versions of the game. The Victoria & Albert Museum has a box set for Polish Bezique dated to 1901 in its collections.

The unique and distinctive feature of Polish Bezique that sets it apart from all other versions of the game is that melds are scored from cards you have already won in tricks, as opposed to cards in hand that you are waiting to play to tricks. There is some mystery as to quite where this version of Bezique came from. The name often given to it Fildinski (also given as Fildniski in Encyclopaedia Britannica) doesn't appear to be a Polish word at all. Cavendish first published A Pocket Guide To Polish Bezique in 1873 for Thomas De La Rue, but his notes shed litlle light on the origin of the variant. According to Cavendish, Polish Bezique was normally played 2000 pts up because the scoring tends to be heavier in this version of the game. It is sometimes also known as ‘Open Bezique’. A four-handed version of Polish Bezique is played as a partnership game using either four or five Piquet packs. Quite a number of players regard Fildinski as a superior game to standard Bezique.

Winston Churchill was a great fan of Bezique who favoured the six pack version known as ‘Chinese Bezique’. He liked to play it with his wife Clemmie, and also at his clubs, and was regarded as a considerable expert at this version of the game. Churchill was once said to have remarked that winning the war was easier than managing the end game at Chinese Bezique. His love of Bezique is documented in his private letters as far back as 1895 when he was 21 years old and newly commissioned as a 2nd Lt. in the 4th Hussars at Aldershot. In those days he played Whist and Bezique. In later life he experimented with other games, including memorably Stud Poker with US President Harry Truman in 1946, but he always favoured Bezique over any other. His daughter-in-law Pamela recalled sitting up with him all night playing Bezique with her as Churchill waited for news of the Allied landings in Sicily on 10 July 1943. The six-pack version of Bezique is played by dealing 12 cards apiece, and the Rubicon is set at 3000 points. Trumps are established by the first Marriage, sequences can be scored in plain suits, and a player can claim for a carte-blanche if dealt a hand with no court cards.

Another famous set of Bezique players were the royal Imperial Romanoff family of Russia. In their final exile at Yekatarinburg, Csar Nicholas, the Tsaritsa Alexandra and their five children often played Bezique together to pass the time. The final entry in Tsaritsa Alexandra’s diary on 17 July 1918, just a few hours before the family were executed reads “Played Bezique with Nicholas, to bed 10&1/2.  —15 degrees”.

The French novelist George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin 1804 -1876) was yet another devotee of the game. In her letters she recounts that while living in Gargilesse in the Loire, she often used to play Bezique for an hour or more in the early evening before proceeding to stay up for the the rest of the night writing.

The19thC English novelist Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) who wrote The Woman in White  and The Moonstone was said to have been fond of playing Bezique, as was the poet and writer Christina Rossetti (1830-1869) according to several biographical notes. She was introduced to the game by her brother’s friends the painter William Bell Scott (1811-1890) and his companion Alice Boyd whose family owned Penkill castle.

Bezique found its way over the Atlantic to the USA. A box version was published by toymaker Albert Swift in 1865, and it was mentioned in print by Dick & Fitzgerald’s Modern Pocket Hoyle (1868). Bezique however was quickly eclipsed however by a related German game that became known as Pinochle, a mispronounciation of Binokel, which was a similar game originally popular in the Wûrtemburg area of Germany. This game which was originally played with a 24 card deck that became doubled to 48 cards swiftly evolved into a variety of forms. Two-handed Pinochle is almost identical to Bezique, but three-handed Pinochle and four-handed partnership Auction Pinochle are quite different games that have more in common with Bid Whist. By 1945 Pinochle was the fourth most popular game in the USA, especially among Jewish and germanic immigrants, although many of the latter subsequently preferred playing the newer and more sophisticated German game of Skat. Pinochle was later displaced in popularity by Gin Rummy and later Canasta in USA but still retains a following, especially in urban blue-collar circles, and in more rural areas.

One odd account of the origins of Bezique and Pinochle can be found in the American Hoyle of 1864. The editor ‘Trump’ claims that Bezique originated in Sweden when a schoolmaster called Gustav Flacker entered a public competition for a cash prize offered by the monarch for a new card game. The schoolmaster’s creation supposedly won and was called Flackernuhle in Sweden before becoming popular in Germany and France. Some other secondary souces say that the Swedish schoolmaster actually lived in Scotland  - The whole story appears to be an absurd fiction and unfounded. The American author Charles Scarne repeated it however, and some US sources uncritically cite this fiction as an authority. Swedish researchers who have examined Swedish archives can find no trace of any such story.

The account of Bezique in the American Hoyle  is quite orthodox in other respects and mentions one variant not documented elsewhere called Bezique Panache which has a requirement that a holding of four Aces, Kings, Queens or Jacks must be a holding of four cards of identical ranks in four different suits in order to score.

The popularity of Bezique led to several attempts by entrepreneurs to market similar looking rival games that used special proprietary packs of non-standard cards. The earliest such attempt was a game called Zetema launched in 1871 by Messrs Joseph Hunt & Sons. Zetema used a special 65 card pack created by adding an entire duplicate suit, and was designed for three players. Six cards were dealt to each player. The game was 300pts, and players scored either by making Bezique type melds in hand, or by making a ‘Zetema’ achieved by playing the fifth card of a rank to the table where the discards were grouped as community melds. Zetema was rapidly forgotten, and was only rediscovered as a Victorian curiosity in 1969 by games researcher Sid Sackson.

In 1891 a colourful boxed game called Khanhoo was marketed by the well known Charles Goodall company. Devised by the Sinologist and HBM Consul Sir William Henry Wilkinson, Khanhoo was actually based on a real Chinese card game dating from the Ming dynasty  called kan-hu ( 看虎 )  or “Watching the the tiger” in mandarin.  The English adaptation like Zetema also used a special 65 card deck. The game involved a mixture of trick taking and meld declaration, but like Zetema, Khanhoo never achieved any popular following.

There is a form of solitaire known as ‘Bezique Patience’ although it is usually better know nowadays as ‘Persian Patience’. The only connection to Bezique is that it uses the same 64 card deck that ordinary Bezique does, i.e. a double pack of two 32 card decks from which the  2.3.4.5.6 in each suit have been removed. The patience is played  by dealing out all 64 cards face-up in a tableau of eight colums of eight overlapping cards. The aim is to free the eight Aces which are placed as foundations above the tableau. The Aces are built upwards in suit, while cards can be moved and built downwards in alternating red/Black colours on the  tableau columns. Only the bottom-most card of each column can be moved, and only one card at a time. Play any foot card to an empty space.Three deals are allowed. (Don’t forget there are no  2.3.4.5.6 cards, the foundations build up in suit as A.7.8.9.T.J.Q.K).

There is an impressive array of Bezique related memorabilia to be found online. Highly decorative box sets of cards and score markers can be found that were manufactured in places as far apart as Krishnagur in the Indian Raj, and the cities of Meiji era Japan. Elegant Bezique packs were printed not only in French suited designs, but also in the distinctive Spanish sword-coin-cup-staff suit packs used in Valencia and other parts of the Iberian peninsula.The game was known across the whole of fashionable Europe in the 19th century,  including Scandanavia and the Russian empire.

One unusual modern centre of popularity for Bezique is in the French speaking Caribbean island of Haiti. A version of the game known as Bésigue Haïtien is still widely played there as a form of four pack Rubicon Bezique with the addition of four jokers. Nine cards are dealt to each player. The local players in Haïti believe the game was originally invented by a man called Charles Bezique. An account in French is available at   http://planetehaiti.com/ayitim/besigue-haitien/

Bezique has maintained a small but  loyal following into the modern internet age. There are apps and online game websites that enable people to play networked games of Bezique with each other, or against a computer, but it remains a niche hobby that appeals most often to card connoiseurs and historians interested in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

September 20

Tomorrow we arrive at Port Said. The weather is beginning to get hot and the troop decks are awful. They say we shall experience great heat in the Red Sea, I feel sure I shall stand it well - being very fat with lots to come off. Will you send me 1 dozen packs of Rubicon bezique white (Turf Club) cards? We have none but horrid green ones - very stiff. 

(Winston Churchill  -  Letters 1896)

Quintille & Tredrille

                                   

     Card Party in the Home of Elis Schroderheim - Pehr Hilleström (1732-1816) Stockholm                       

David Parlett in his work A History of Card Games - (1991) says that Quintille was first mentioned in France as far back as 1680 by Mme de Sevigne. It was based on a Spanish game known as Cinquillo or Cinquento. It was a version of the three handed game of Ombre to be played by five people .

In the game of Quintille it was almost impossible for one player to win a Solo game against four opponents, so the idea of an alliance or partnership formed by calling the holder of a non-trump King was born. In Quintille the entire pack of 40 cards was dealt out among five players so each held a hand of eight cards. To win Sacardo or game 5 tricks were required. The Remise was 4 tricks, and Codille was 3 tricks or less.

Quadrille arose when players applied the principle of of play used in Quintille to a new version of the game of Ombre played by four with a 40 card pack. As all cards were dealt out, each player now held 10 cards. To win Sacardo 6 tricks were now required, a Remise was 5 tricks, and Codille was 4 tricks or less.

The oddest development of all, once Quadrille had become popular, was to apply the same principle of play to a game played by three which was called Tredrille. Richard Seymour refers to this with some scorn as the Irishism of Quadrille by three, or Tredrille

There are some people who will play this branch of Ombre by dealing out ten cards apiece between Three and this in dowright Irish phraeseology they call Three-handed Quadrille; which in plain English is Four-handed Ombre played by Three persons. But this silly manner deserves our ridicule than any other notice.

Why anyone wanting to play a three handed game would not simply revert to the classic game of Ombre is very difficult to understand. People however often chose to play Tredrille, and did so by stripping the pack to 30 cards. 

The French author Mons. Martin writing in 1764 recommended Tredrille only as a makeshift in case three players were awaiting a fourth to make up a party at Quadrille. 

Martin offers two different schemes for reducing the pack to 30 cards, one involving four suits, and the other preserving only three suits.

Tredrille with Four Suits:

Red Suits -  A K Q J 2 3 7 ( 2 x 7 =  14 cards in total)

Black Suits - A K Q J 7 6 5 2 ( 2 x 8 =  16 cards in total)

This scheme gives a deck of 30 cards in total, which means when all cards are dealt out, each player will have 10 cards, exactly as in Quadrille. The Trump suits will have an identical number of cards

Red Trumps  -     Spadille Manille Basto Punto K Q J 2 3   (9 cards)

Black Suits - Spadille Manille Basto K Q J 7 6 5           (9 cards)

Red non-Trump - K Q J A 2 3 7

Black non-Trump - K Q J 7 6 5 2

Martin says that in this version, the only calls played are Mediateur and Sans Prendre.

The game is played over 16 Tours, 12 single and 4 double.

The declarer stakes six fish before each deal, and all other payements are as in Quadrille.

Tredrille with Three Suits

Spades - A K Q J 7 6 5 4 3 2

Clubs - A K Q J 7 6 5 4 3 2

Hearts - A K Q J 7 *  5 4 3 2

Diamonds - K

i.e  - Throw out all of the Diamond suit except K♦︎, and discard the 6♥︎  as well.

Hearts - Spadille Manille Basto Punto K Q J 2 3 4 5 7    (12 cards)

Diamonds - Spadille Manille (K♦︎) Basto                              (3 cards)

Spades - Spadille Manille Basto K Q J 7 6 5 4 3              (11 cards)

Clubs - Spadille Manille Basto K Q J 7 6 5 4 3              (11 cards)

Martin says that the suit of Diamonds is treated as a first Favourite suit, and that a second  Favourite suit is cut at random because this form of Tredrille is always played with two Favourite suits. 

The calls of Mediateur and Sans Prendre are the only calls used.

If hombre has all four Kings and all four Queens, then they may still call Mediateur  by exchanging the King of Diamonds for any non trump Knave.

As before, all other payments follow the pattern of Quadrille.

Opinions of Tredrille varied. The character of Miss Ilex in Gryll Grange by Thomas Love Peacock says:

The variety of the game called tredrille — the Ombre of Pope’s Rape of the Lock — is a pleasant game for three. Pope had many opportunities of seeing it played, yet he has not described it correctly; and I do not know that this has been observed.

In fact Miss Ilex is confused, Pope was describing the 40 card game of Ombre in his famous poem The Rape of The Lock (1714), and not the 30 card game of Tredille.

The writer Horace Walpole tells an amusing anecdote against himself involving a game at Tredrille:

I was playing at eighteen-penny Tredrille with the Duchess of Newcastle and Lady Browne, and certainly not much interested in the game. I cannot recollect nor conceive what I was thinking of, but I pushed the cards gravely to the Duchess and said ‘Doctor you are to deal’. You may guess at their astonishment, and how much  it made us all laugh. 

(Letters - 27th September 1774 Strawberry Hill - to Hon. H.S. Conway).

Auction Quadrille

An interesting work called A New Treatise Upon Real Quadrille From The French of Mons. Martin’ was published in 1764 by G. Burnet of London. It is printed as a dual language work with verso pages in the original French, and the matching English translation in recto.

It is a very rare book with institutional copies to be found only in the British Library and the University of Missouri, but a scan is available in Google books.

The most interesting section is one chapter (VIII) on the rarely described version known as Auction Quadrille, or Quadrille à L’Enchaîre in French.

According to Mons. Martin, Auction Quadrille is played without any form of ‘Ask Leave’, no Mediateur, no Sans Prendre, and no Favourite trump suit.

Eldest hand has precedence, and the lowest allowable bid is in effect to take four tricks. If eldest hand says “I will play”, then that is taken as a bid of four tricks, and a younger hand must overcall  by explicitly naming a higher number e.g “I also for five tricks”. The next player may overcall by saying “And I for six tricks”, and rarely a fourth might say “and I for seven tricks”. Precedence goes to the elder hand if two players are prepared to play for the same number of tricks. N.B. no trump suit is stated at this point in the bidding.

The hombre only names their trump suit once the other three players have passed

Eldest hand leads to the first trick, and the normal rules of trick play at Quadrille apply.

Martin says “as most of these games are passed, they consist of 12 single rounds and 4 double ones, and six fishes are always put down..” (two for the game and four for the matadores - one apiece for Manille and Basto, and two for Spadille). A Tour or round was  a cycle of four deals, one by each player, so he was referring to  64 deals (16 x 4).

The basic settlement for winning your game by taking at least as many tricks as were bid for is along the lines of (n + 1)  fishes where ’n’  is  the number of tricks bid for, and (n + 3) where matadores are held e.g  4 tricks gain 5 fishes for a simple game, and 7 fishes with matadores.

These payments are exactly doubled in ‘Double Rounds’

A Vole wins a bonus of 20 fishes for bids of 4 to 6 tricks, and 40 fishes for bids of 7+ tricks.

The Vole premium is exactly doubled in ‘Double Rounds’.

An Announced Vole wins a premium of 200 fish.

The general scheme of payment for failing to make your bid is along the general lines of being beasted exactly the same amount you would have won along with these side payments

Reward/Consolation    -  One fish to each opponent.

Matadores -   One fish to each opponent if three are held.

Footnote
The game is played with the same 40 card deck used for Ombre and other forms of Quadrille and Quintille (remove 8.9.10 of each suit).

Red suits       - K.Q.J.A.2.3.4.5.6.7

Black suits     - K.Q.J.7.6.5.4.3.2

Red Trumps     -  Spadille. Manille. Basto. Punto.K.Q.J.2.3.4.5.6

Black Trumps  -   Spadille. Manille. Basto. K.Q.J.7.6.5.4.3

Where the Matador trumps are:

Spadille    -  A♠︎

Manille     -  Red 7/Black 2

Basto       -  A♣︎

Punto      -  A♥︎/♦︎

Il Flusso

Flush          (il Flusso, Le Flux)

(The Pope and the kings of England & France playing Le Flux - woodcut caricature -1499)

Flush is an ancient 3 card gambling game that is first mentioned by Lorenzo de Medici (1449-1492) in a set of poems called  "Canti Carnascia Leschi" where the game is mentioned as being in common use among the people of Florence (along with the Venetian game of Basseta). Lorenzo de Medici is said to have written these poems in his youth, so the reference can be dated to around 1470.

Flush or il Flusso as it was known in Italy, is one of 10 games mentioned by the poet Franchesco Berni (1497-1535)  in a commentary called  "il Capitolo della Gioco Primiera" which was published at Rome in 1526. Berni who spent much of  his life at the Papal court refers to:
Basseta, Cricca, Trionfi, Trionfi-piccoli, il Flusso,Trentuno, Noviera, Setiera, Quintiera, Ronfa.
Much of Berni's work is given over to a discussion of Primiera (Primero) which he regarded as the best game of all.

Gerolamo Cardano (1501-1576) who lived in Milan refers to both "Fluxus, and "Fluxus Gallicus" in  his Latin work "Liber de Ludo Aleae" (1564). He regarded Gallicus Fluxus (French Flush) as the most elegant variation of the game, and supplied some technical details on its method of play:

"Fortunae solius sunt primiera fluxus, qui fit cum tribus chartis: gallicus est pulcherrrimus, nam unum cum figura, vel cum binario efficit 21, qui summas est punctus apud reliqua, plerasque gentes. Sed apud gallos, si adsit aliud unum fiunt viginti unum cum dimidio. Sed tria puncta superant etiam fluxum  et est supremum, et pro fluxu et puncto haberi potest. Viginti etiam cum uno puncto alia in charta efficit viginti cum dimidio, et ita habent viginti, viginti cum dimidio, viginti unum,  et viginti unum cum dimidio,  et viginti duo, qui (ut dixi) superior est fluxui."
(Liber de Ludo Aleae  xxv de De Ludis Chartarum )

Translated this reads:
"Solely dependent on chance are Primero and Flush, which is played with three cards: the French game is the most beautiful, for an Ace with a Court card or a  2 makes 21 which is in general the highest point recognised  in most countries. But amongst the French, should there be another Ace in hand, it makes 21.5. But three Aces beats even the Flush and is the  highest hand of all  for it can be counted both as a  Flush and an Ace . A point of 20  with an Ace as the other card makes 20.5, and so they have  20, 20.5, 21, 21.5 and 22, which (as I have said)  is higher than  the flush"

Le Flux or Flush became very popular in France. According to chroniclers, Louis XII (1462-1514) played at Flush within the sight of his troops, and his successor Francis I (1494-1547) was said to have been addicted to the game. It was also the favoured game of Anne of Brittany and her son Charles VIII in the 1490's. A Swiss wood-cut print of the early 16th century shows  the Kings of France and Switzerland  playing at what is clearly 3 card Flush. According to  Ed.S. Taylor's "History of Playing Cards" written around 1865, the game of Flush was still  being played in the Charente district of France in the mid 19th century.


Rules of Play

Players  - 2 to 10

Deck  - In Italy the 40 card deck (8.9.10s removed)
            In Spain the 48 card deck ( 10's removed)
            In France the 36 card deck  (6.5.4.3 's removed)
            in England  the 52 card deck  (standard)

The 36 card deck with the 2's retained  is probably the most authentic deck to use for Le Flux . It has the same  deck and point structure  used for playing the old game of Trappola in Europe and was also the preferred deck for playing Gillet.

Point values  -  Aces     = 11
                      Court cards    = 10
                      Twos       = 10
                       Other cards    = pip value

Method -  Players stake to a pool and receive three cards face down. They examine their cards and  make bets  against each other as to who has the strongest hand. The eldest hand had the option of passing and re-entering the betting. When all are done, those who have not withdrawn and abandoned their stakes  then show down their cards. The money is won by the holder of the highest  pointed  2 or 3 card flush of 21 points or less. A 3 card flush beat any two card flush.   Certain combinations of Aces were special cases which could win the Flush.

Special Cases
 A.A.A    - A Pair-Royal of Aces is conventionally scored as a winning  flush of     22
 A. (T+A)  A Pair of aces with a court or 2 flush to one of them  counts as               21.5
 (A+T)   An Ace with a Court,  or 2 flush  is the normal  winning high flush            21
A + (20)    A two card flush of 20  points  + Ace of another suit counts                    20.5

All other 2 or 3 card  flushes are counted on their pip values, and the highest pointed  flush hand wins the stakes. If a 3 card flush exceeded 21, then the highest two cards were counted.  In the event of a point tie, the Eldest hand wins the stakes.


Le Flux was displaced  in the latter half of the 16th century by a more complex game called Gillet (known as Gile in Italy), which bore a marked resemblance to the game of Post & Pair played in England according to  an entry in John Florio's "Italian Dictionary" (1611).

Gile Alla Greca

Gile Alla Greca - Piccolo           ( Italian suited Trevigiane Deck)

This name turns up rather obliquely in some academic papers about early Italian card games and the history and development of Tarocchi. Some writers seemed to feel that it was related to the old Italian game of Trionfetti which was documented by name from the time of Berni in 1526. Several Italian authors stated that Gile Alla Greca had been played in Italy, especially in Venice up until the 19th century and that there were even descriptions of it to be found in printed books dealing with card games of that period in Italy. Needless to say I found this rather intriguing and wished to trace such printed sources. For a long time I could not find the actual texts, but then in 2014 I found two online sources* that pointed me towards digital scans of a slim pamphlet barely 20 pages long that was originally printed in Venice in 1845.

The title is 'Instruzione Sul Giuoco Del Piccolo denominato Gile Alla Grega ossia Trionfetti della Greca Nazione'  It seems to have been edited by and printed under a pseudonym of D.R. Dalmata.

It took some while to translate this document because the text is written in a rather decorative and antiquated form of literary Venetian Italian with unexpected and inconsistent spellings and contractions, and the pamphlet had also been typeset and proof-read in an erratic and highly error prone way. The printer had frequently confounded both the letters 'b' and 'h', and the letters 'm' and 'n'; and towards the end of the text had taken to adding an entirely spurious lettter 'n'  into  a number of  polysyllabic words where it didn't belong. A significant portion of the pamphlet is devoted to a lengthy and uninformative discussion of of laws and points of etiquette in the game.

Historical Precis

The author says that the game was of Levantine origin by which he means that it came from countries on the Eastern side of the Mediterranean sea, away from Italy. He says it came to Italy in the final days of the Venetian Republic shortly before its collapse around 1796. According to the author the game was orginally called Mikro which is the Greek equivalent of the Italian word Piccolo meaning 'small' which is one of the names given to it in Italy.  The author says the game was first discovered by Venetian soldiers and sailors who were stationed on the Ionian islands when the Venetian Republic controlled that part of the eastern Mediterranean, and had extensive garrisons on the islands (between 1238 and 1797). He says the game was especially popular in the Venetian colony of Dalmatia (on the coast of modern Croatia) and that the form of the game popular in Venice most likely came from there. The association with the game of Trionfetti seems to be largely a figure of speech, the author was trying to say that  the game had been as popular in the Ionian Greek islands as Trionfetti once was in Italy.

Precis of Playing Rules

Pack - The 52 card Italian suited Trevigiane pack of Venice  - King (re), Cavalier (cavallo), Knave (fante),10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,A (asso)

Players - Four in two partnerships  - (A two handed variant also exists)

Preliminaries

Six cards are dealt face down on the table.The players draw and turn up one at a time. The first two players to draw cards of the same suit become partners. against the other two.

Alternative method -  deal one card face up to each player and keep dealing until two players hold a pair of an agreed card. These two  become partners against the other two.

If five players wish to play then one must be eliminated by a double draw for partners. If six players are at the table then two must be eliminated by a  double draw, but these two form a partnership in a reserve team that replaces whichever pair of players lose the game. The reserve pair are know as battifondo (the shoals)

Scoring

The game is played for points that may be recorded with pencil and paper, chalk  marks on a table, or by counters. (or coffee grounds ! )

The game is normally played to 77 points up, but is sometimes limited to 41 or 51 points.

Deal

The players cut for deal, King high, Ace low.The dealer  deals three cards face down to each player and turns up one more on top of the stock.

Piccolo

The first round of competition is for the best pair of matching cards of the same rank known as as gile or piccolo. King is highest card, Ace is lowest.

A player makes a claim for best pair by saying 'piccolo'

A rival may contest by saying 'un altro' (another) or pass by saying 'Buono' (good) or 'Buono il suo piccolo' (good it is your piccolo)

If there is a contest, the first player must now bet a certain number of points of his chosing as a vada  e.g.  'dieci vada' (I go for ten points)

If the other player  wishes to challenge (accuso), then they must concede a gain of 10 points to the opponents if they cannot beat their pair.

If two equal pairs are shown, then the elder hand wins.

Gilon

A Gilon is a pair-royal, three cards of the same rank. Rather oddly it has no special status in Gile Alla Greca. The pamphlet advises a player to bet a gilon of aces as a piccolo or pair because if you bet it as a punto it will be worth only 11 points, the value of a single ace.

Punto

The next competiiton is for the best flush point up to a limit of 21 points

Ace counts 11 points

Court Cards and Twos count 10 points

All other cards count their pip value

The punto cannot exceed 21 points made up of cards of the same colour and suit.

The compettion for punto is done exactly like that for the piccolo.

 If two players wish to compete then one wagers a vada of so many points, and if the other challenges, they show down.

Baratto (Barter)

At either the piccolo or the punto a player may offer a baratto (barter) for a specified number of points by placing their cards face down on the table

This means they are offering a wager to win the bet after exchanging their three cards with those of their opponent.

If the opponent accepts, the two players exchange hands face down on the table then expose to see who has won.

Resto

At any point  a player may make  a bet for the rest of the points needed to win the game by saying  either:

 resto della partita  vada ad accusar   (the rest of the game goes on a challenge)

 resto della partita vada a baratto         (the rest of the game goes on a barter)

e.g if they are on 60 pts in a 77 pt target game, then the wager is for the balance of 17 pts needed to close out the game.

The first statement is a simple showdown challenge.

The second is the offer of a barter and a showdown after a mutual exchange of cards with the opposing player.

Keeping cards

when each round is completed, the players keep the cards of their previous hand together face up on the table (like open tricks), and three more cards are dealt  face down to each player for the next round of betting.  As the deal progresses, more and more cards from previous hands will be in view, and it will become easier to calculate which cards are left undealt in stock.

Inspecting the Stock

Players are not allowed to touch or inspect the undealt stock until the fourth and final round of betting  when only four undealt cards will be left in stock. At this point  players may by agreement turn the last four cards over for all to see.

Passemo

If all players agree to do so, then a round can be passed out immediately after the deal.

One player says passemo (let us pass ?)  or andemo a monte (shall we go to the stock?)

If the others agree, all cards are returned to stock,  then shuffled, and a new deal is made.

Footnotes

The two-handed variant is almost identical, except that the final four cards are dealt and played out as a hand of just two cards apiece.

The game is effectively one where all the counters start in a central pool, and a team draws the appropriate number of counters won by each succesful wager at each turn into a side pool of their own, until the specified target number is reached.

Turning the top card of the stock at each deal seems to have no other purpose other than to expose a card to view. Players are not allowed to peek at the bottom card of the stock. A recut or a reshuffle can be asked for if peeking is suspected.

The pedantic attention to correct pronunciation of technical terms in the game found in the pamphlet reflects the differences between the distinctive Venetian dialect which was a lingua franca throughout the Venetian Stato da Mar for many centuries, and the Tuscan dialect of Dante which became the standard form of mainland Italian. The game evolved in the Greek speaking part of the Venetian sea-borne empire where Veneto was the administrative colonial language, and traveled across the Adriatic from the Venetian colony in Dalmatia where a variety of other Romance languages were also in use.

* http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=vCdXAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA1&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false

Researching Post & Pair

Researching "Post and Pair"

I first came across a description of Post and Pair thirty-five years ago in a modern facsimile copy of  "The Compleat Gamester" written by Charles Cotton and published in 1674. I was researching other period card games notably Ombre and Primero at the time, and paid little attention to Cotton's brief account of Post and Pair.

Several years later when I was writing up my notes on games I decided to include a reconstruction of Post and Pair partly for the sake of completeness, and partly because the odd name and the fact that the game had West country associations  had captured my attention. I naively assumed  from a cursory reading of Cotton's text that it would be a trivial task.  After all it was just a three card vying game, how difficult could it be ? I soon found out.

When I tried to extract a playable set of rules from Cotton's description I quickly found myself floundering. What exactly was a 'Post", what was a "Seat", how were the stakes divided ? As usual I looked for other sources and discovered there were none. Cotton's account of Post and Pair is the only original period  description. Later accounts by  Randle Holme "Academy of Armory"(1688) and  Richard Seymour "The Court Gamester"(1734) are pirated verbatim from Cotton, and Hoyle does not even mention Post and Pair. Try as I might, I could not locate any period dialogues, play scripts or poems involving the play of a hand at Post and Pair, though I did begin to accumulate an impressive array of literay allusions to the game (it was a very long while before I stumbled across the 17th century poem "Post & Pare compared to Mortall Life" by John Davies of Hereford).

When I compared my notes with the writings of other published  card game specialists, I discovered that I was not alone. No-one could make sense of the over-brief description of Post and Pair in "The Compleat Gamester". Quite a few writers I found had misled themselves by assuming that Post & Pair was related to the 18th century game of Brag, or by supposing it was almost the same as Brag's most immediate predecessor  Bone-Ace, even though Cotton provides quite separate descriptions of these two games. Most of these modern writers  attempted to rationalise their reconstructions by assuming that Cotton's account was corrupt or "muddled". This I felt was unsatisfactory. You can "prove" anything by tampering with texts. You have to respect your sources and assume that they were being truthful and that the original author meant exactly what they seem to be saying, however inconvenient it might be to a modern historian trying to draw up neat genealogies of card games.

Cracking the rules of Post and Pair turned into a passing hobby of several decades duration. I studied Cotton's 300 word description of the game like a Talmudic proof-reader. It became an exercise  in cryptography and inference which led at times in unexpected directions. Slowly I began to uncover relevant information about how the game was played.

Some of the first real clues came from French sources. Randle Cotgrave's French-English dictionary of 1611 for instance confirmed that a "Post" meant a flush. At which point the origin of the familiar proverb "Pipped at the Post" thundered into my head. The "Post" was the highest pointed flush holding of a suit with the Ace counting 1.

I was reading  Girolamo Cardano's 16th century "Liber de Ludo Aleae" in the original Latin, and was struck by his account of  a game  called Gallicus Fluxus. I realised that the English translator Gould had been foxed by Cardano's Latin, and had failed to realise that the Latin phrase "habeo ego"  did not mean "in my opinion", but was  in fact a reference to another 3 card game called "Je l'ai" or Gé in French, also known as Gillet. I discovered that John Florio had specifically associated Post and Pair with Gillet (Gile) in his English Italian Dictionary(1611). Some years earlier I had obtained photocopies of large parts of the 18th century  French compendium "Academie Universelle des jeux" which contains an account of Gillet.  I now re-read all of these sources in tandem.

It became clear that the English game of Post and Pair carries a Spanish name,  for "Post" comes from the Spanish  "Apostar " meaning to wager a sum of money. The game is however part of a closely related family of games all derived from the more ancient European game of il Flusso or Flush, and played under a variety  of names in different countries. The English called their version "Post and Pair". The French called it Gé or Gillet, the Germans called it Dreisatz, and the Italians called it Trionfetti or Gile a la Greca in Venice.

For a long time I boggled at the idea of a 3 card vying game which involved a trump suit,  in which a final show-down was optional, and the largest stakes were settled solely on the highest single card. All of these however were directly implied within Cotton's account of Post and Pair, and amplified by my own research. Eventually an internet link led me to search for an obscure poem called "Mortall Life compared to Post and Pare", an allegory which is contained within "The Wittes Pilgrimage"  by the cleric and minor poet John Davies of Hereford written in 1610. Finding this text was far from easy. It has been out of print in England since the 19th century. I eventually located a copy in a searchable online  database in Stanford university library USA, which would only liberate one line of text at a time. I had to keep doing overlapping chained-phrase searches to recover the 18 verses I required. Once I had the poem, careful reading of this time-capsule appears to confirm my reading of Cotton's rules for Post and Pair.

Post and Pair continues to fascinate me. It was the favourite game of  Shakespeare's great contemporary Ben Jonson, it was also a favourite game of George Washington, the first President of the USA. Numerous 17th century authors such as Sir John Harrington, Francis Willughby  and John Earle  refer to it. According to some folklorists such as the rural writer Richard Jefferies (1848-1887), the game survived here in the West Country up until the 1860s. It still does seem incredible that no-one other than Cotton ever wrote down the rules of the game, or that reconstructing them would prove so difficult.