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Ten/Seven Point Pitch

Here Dad is partnered with LeeAnn (my wife) and Kelly (married to Jeff; my nephew) and Heath (my youngest) are partnered playing pitch.

The term pitch when applied to cards means to lead a card of a particular suit in order to establish that suit as trumps. The trump suit is actually determined by the first card the winning bidder throws. In pitch, as I know it, once the winning bidder is established, that person will need to select a suit that will be trump for the game. The trump suit is a suit that will have the highest priority over all other suits for that game.

Pitch has been played at family reunions, in deer camp, or for fun. Yet this game seems to be unknown outside of the central US. It is listed in no rule book; there are games called "Pitch", but they are in no way similar to the game we midwesterners know.

We took the game seriously. Dad and Judy (my sister-in-law) always played Rick (my brother) and I. In deer camp or elsewhere our partners were always changing, but Rick and I were always partners if we were both there. Dad taught us how to play, or overbid, and we never gave up on pitch.

The most astounding story about pitch is when we rented a building in downtown Collins, Missouri for a warehouse on a job we were doing. Next door, in a vacant storefront, was the club for dominoes and pitch that the locals all antied up to rent. On the outside was a sign which read Advice or Counsel on Any Subject, Inquire Within. It was cold and rainy and since they had a pot bellied stove burning and since I was such a friendly fellow, I went nextdoor. I was quickly invited to play something. Dominoes was not my game, I'm not very good; but pitch, there I was an expert.

I needed a partner and Ralph West was the only person who knew how to play. Ralph and I played 7-point with such luck that we became known as the out-of-town boys. Whatever he didn't have, I did, and vice versa. After several games, winning each and complaining about not having any competition, we had to go back nextdoor:

1. Because I knew our luck couldn't last and,
2. I forget. I think number one will suffice.

They invited us back and left to get the best pitch player in the county, or at least that club. Ralph and I went back later that afternoon and several times hence. Now I've lost numerous times at pitch and knew that our luck couldn't hold. But it did. They would come out on the job to get us to play, we were that good, but soon learned that it had to be wet for us to quit and soon the invitation became a standing one.

Pitch, by whatever point-variant is played, is in the similar vein as Spades and Bridge as a trick-taking game. Play uses a standard deck of 52 cards with the two jokers included. Players partner with the player across from them and are each dealt 9 cards. The number of cards dealt at a time is arbitrary, ranging from one to three. For the sake of convenience, dealers will typically deal three cards at a time. Some people like to have the player to dealer's right cut the deck after it has been shuffled.

The bid begins to the dealer's left at a minimum of four points and goes around the table, with players increasing the bid based on what they think they can take; if everyone passes the bid, the dealer is required to take the bid at four. The maximum bid is, of course, ten/seven. "Shooting the Moon" is basically a bid of 31/21. To win the bidding partners must get all ten points. In most cases shooting the moon and winning results in winning the game. Allowed is "overshooting the moon" or "double shoot", which means a player may override a previous player's shoot-the-moon bid with his or her own shoot-the-moon bid, doubling of points result.

The player who announces the highest bid calls the trump suit, which is the only suit of import in this game (excepting the jokers and the left bauer or off-jack [jack of the same color, but not the trump suit]). All players, save the high bidder, discard all the cards from their hands that are not of the trump suit and request enough cards from the remaining 18-card deck to bring their hand up to 6. (*Note: If a player mistakenly discards a trump card, or one of the three other speical cards, it is a free-for-all to whomever notices and picks it up off the table first) The remaining cards in the deck are given to the bid-winner, who can pick through them one-by-one, discarding to 6 before play begins.

If a player has more than six trump cards at the beginning of a hand, that player must "burn" or "bury" the extra cards. The player does this by laying down the extra cards on and declaring that he or she is burying those cards. Point cards cannot be buried.

Play begins with the high bidder leading. Play proceeds around the table, with the player playing the highest valued trump card taking the trick and leading the following trick. Other cards (besides trump) are off and must be declared as such and do not have any value. If a player leads an off card and no one trumps, he wins the trick and leads again.

If a player has no trump cards, that player may declare this by saying he or she is "out" or "up" when it comes his or her turn to play. Cards are ranked from Ace to Two, with the Off-Jack, High Joker, and Low Joker respectively taking the positions between the Jack and Ten.

Points are accrued by teams for taking the point cards in the tricks they take, which are Ace, Jack, Off-Jack (Left Bauer), High Joker, Low Joker (one has to rank higher than the other for play continuity), Ten, Three or "Trey", and Two. All are worth a point apiece, except the three, which is worth three in 10-point pitch nothing in 7-point. The two is retained by the player who played it for his or her team and is not taken along with the trick.

Both teams receive points for the point cards they take, unless the high-bidding team does not meet their bid goal, in which case they go "set" and lose their number of bid points instead of gaining. Teams play to 31/21 points. It is best that the players decide on the rules for the game before it begins, otherwise the game is guaranteed to end in an argument. After the game is scored, the person to the left of the dealer of the last hand becomes the new dealer.

High-Low-Jack

Pitch, is also known as Setback or High-Low-Jack. There is also a set of very similar games known as Smear, is a North American game, derived from the old English game of All Fours (which was also known in America as Seven Up or Old Sledge). Pitch is All Fours with bidding added. Some of the newer versions of Pitch include other features such as extra points and an opportunity to improve one's hand by taking extra cards and discarding.

There are two main types of Pitch game: Partnership Pitch (played with partners, obviously) and Cutthroat Pitch (in which everyone plays for themselves). The various types of Partnership Pitch are most popular in the mid-west and are family or social games played to a score. There are many variations of pitch, mostly involving increasing the number of points from four to five, ten or more by introducing extra scoring trumps.

Smear is game of the All Fours group, similar to Pitch or Setback. It is played in several versions in Minnesota and Winsconsin, USA, and in Ontario, Canada. It is known in some places as Schmier. It seems likely that the name is related to the German word schmieren, which is used in point-trick games such as Skat for the technique of discarding a high-value card on a trick which your partner is winning. The name might perhaps also be connected to "smudge", which is the highest bid in some forms of Pitch.

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