Pitch Rules — How to Play and Keep Score

Overview

Pitch belongs to the old All Fours family, and its charm is that almost nothing you capture matters. Only a few named prizes exist in each hand, and the auction is a promise to collect a certain number of them. Miss and you are set back by exactly what you promised, which is why a scoresheet for this game has to accept negative numbers from the very first hand.

Setup

Two to seven players, most often four in two partnerships. Six cards each from a standard deck, with jokers added in the larger variants. Nothing is turned for trumps. Settle the variant and the target before the first deal, because the variant decides the highest legal bid.

How to play

Starting to the dealer's left, each player either passes or bids a number. The high bidder, called the pitcher, leads to the first trick and whatever they lead becomes trumps. Trumps must be followed if you hold one; on a plain suit lead you may either follow suit or play a trump, but you may not discard another suit while you can follow. When the hand is done, the named points are awarded.

Scoring

Four point pitch: high, the highest trump in play, goes to the player who holds it; low, the lowest trump in play, goes to whoever takes it; jack, the jack of trumps, goes to whoever wins the trick containing it; game goes to whoever collected the most counters, where each ace is 4, each king 3, each queen 2, each jack 1 and each ten 10. There are 80 counters in the deck and a tie for game means nobody scores it. Each of the four is worth 1, so bids run from two to four.

Five point adds the off-jack, the other jack of the same colour as the trump jack, worth 1. Six point drops the off-jack and adds two jokers at 1 each. Seven point uses high, low, jack, off-jack, both jokers and game, all worth 1. Nine point is the same list with a single joker plus the three of trumps worth 3. Ten point uses high, low, jack, off-jack, both jokers, game at 1 each and the three of trumps at 3, which totals ten.

Settlement is the same in every variant. The bidder counts the points they actually captured. If that number reaches the bid they score it. If it does not, they are set: nothing is added and the amount of the bid is subtracted instead. Defenders always score the points they captured, whatever the bidder did.

A smudge is a bid for every point in the variant. Depending on the setting, making it either doubles the hand or wins the game on the spot, and failing costs the full bid.

Ending the game

Play continues until a side reaches the target. With the standard rule, only a side that made its own bid on that hand may finish the game, so a defender who crosses the line keeps playing until they win a bid of their own.

Common variations

Some tables let the bidder simply take trumps without leading them. Others deal three at a time twice and permit a draw from the stock. In the count-down form everyone starts at twenty-one and subtracts, so the race is toward zero.