After a cold, rainy spring, warm summer evenings have finally arrived. Crickets, cicadas and tree frogs sound outside the screen porch. A thunderstorm washes through without cooling the humid air. It's euchre season.
Unless you're from the Upper Midwest or Upstate New York — or you've served in the US Navy — this term may be unfamiliar to you. You may associate euchre vaguely with elderly Canadian women gathered around folding tables in senior centers; this would not be inaccurate. But if you've played, you know what I'm talking about. If not, it's high time you learned.
Maybe you don't consider yourself the card game type. This determination is sorely uninformed without firsthand experience of euchre.
Euchre is a four-handed card game in the same family as hearts and spades, a poor (but discerning) man's bridge. Approaching Platonic perfection in all that one could wish from playing cards, it combines the deceptive simplicity of gin with the addictive competitiveness of poker, and it moves briskly enough to consume many hours of your life in the blink of an eye.
In Indiana, when there are four people, there is euchre.
Start with the cards. Euchre is played with nine through high ace; the rest of the deck will remain waxy and stiff for eternity. In theory, one could purchase a Pinochle deck, which is the equivalent of two euchre decks, except that you'll need a pair of fours and a pair of sixes with which to keep score.
You're lost already.
Start again. Euchre is based on three simple premises. The first is trump. At the beginning of each hand, a trump suit is declared. A card of this suit beats any non-trump card, and high trump beats low trump.
The second premise is following suit. If a heart is played, you must also play a heart if you have one. If you don't, you can play anything you want, trump or garbage. If no trump is played, then the highest card of the suit led wins — unless trump is played, in which case the highest trump played takes it.
The third sounds more confusing than it is — you must believe this. Ready? The highest card in the trump suit is the jack of that suit. The second highest card is the other jack of the same color. Then ace down to nine. When spades are trump, the jack of spades reigns supreme, followed by the jack of clubs. The jack of clubs is to be considered a spade for purposes of following suit. The rest of the clubs are unaffected. If clubs are trump, reread this paragraph with the suits reversed. In red suits, likewise. You get the idea.
That wasn't so bad, was it? For convenience's sake, these special cards are referred to as the Right Bower (jack of the trump suit) and the Left Bower (other jack of the same color).
Okay, let's partner up. That's right: like bridge, euchre is played by two teams of two. Unlike bridge, all four people play every hand. Why would anyone play bridge again?
The cards are shuffled, offered to the right to be cut, then dealt five to each player; the remaining four cards — the "widow" or "kitty" — are placed face-down in front of the dealer, and must never be viewed. The top card in the widow is turned up. ("Turn up" — see how euchre has entered the lexicon? This is only one of many examples.) Beginning to the dealer's left, each player has the opportunity to declare the shown suit as trump. If any of the four does so, the card is "ordered up" into the dealer's hand and another, presumably lesser card is discarded. Remember: regardless of which team calls it, it's the dealer who gets the up card.
If all pass, including the dealer, the latter "turns it down" (see what I mean?), and the player to his or her left begins a second round of bidding in which any remaining suit may be called, or none at all, in which case a misdeal is declared and the deal passes to the left.
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Almost there. Once trump has been determined, the player to the dealer's left leads a card and away we go. Remember: Follow suit, high beats low, trump beats non-trump, garbage beats nothing. Five rounds, or "tricks," will be played. The team that calls the trump suit must win the majority; three or four tricks gets one point, all five gets you two, two or fewer and you're "euchred," the other team gets two points and your name is mud.
In a "Loner," the bidder goes alone against the other two while his partner sits mute. Four points if he makes all five, otherwise scoring as usual.
Play to 10 points. Use the four and six of a suit (different colors for opposing teams, naturally) to keep score — show a pip for each point you make, and when you get to nine, lay both cards side by side face down. You are now "in the barn," a point away from victory, and it is your privilege to do the "barn dance," a modified high five/soul shake that incorporates elements of cow milking.
Strategy will emerge naturally as you play. Don't trump your partner's ace, lead high and off, don't count on your partner for more than one trick, that kind of thing. "Turn down a bower, lose for an hour."
Now, lean back from the table and rub your eyes a moment, let it sink in. Take in the ambience, the fireflies pulsing beyond the screen, the moths flopping around in the old porch lamp. The cards have softened with the humidity and curl slightly. It goes without saying that there are at hand sweaty cans of Bud Light by the case. Some have cited the salutary effects of other intoxicants, but it is not the policy of this magazine to endorse such things. Cookies are followed by fudge followed by stale potato chips.
The culture embraces copious badinage. Any self-respecting euchre player could trash-talk Reggie Miller to tears before the top score card turned.
A word must be said about cheating. Although there is a provision for those who fail to follow suit when they can — two points to the other team for a "reneg" (mispronounced with a hard G) — it is universally frowned on as a deliberate move, and worthy of scorn when it happens accidentally. Beginners are to be watched carefully for renegging; when they think they're getting the hang of it, they'll start trumping left and right with no regard to the off cards they're legally bound to play. They should be forgiven the penalty and a misdeal declared in order not to quell their budding enthusiasm.
Stealing the deal, on the other hand, is acceptable, and must be conceded if the out-of-turn dealer can finish distributing the cards and turn up the top of the widow before being detected. However, if you get caught, or worse, succeed and brag about it, you will piss off the other team and lead them to accuse you of more pernicious forms of cheating, such as passing signs or renegging. Better to enjoy the potential benefit of an extra trump card in silence — but what fun would that be?
Sadly, even euchre isn't invulnerable to the ravages of age. As the years pass and we settle down, focus on our careers, marry and start a family, it becomes ever more difficult to get a game going. Spouses share everything but passion for the game, and cast their votes elsewhere. Dinner parties begin with small-talk and end the same way, and suddenly it's possible for it to be "too late to start that." Bachelor weekends come fewer and farther between, and Saturday afternoons are spent lugging costly gear around manicured greens. The old half-worn deck lies forgotten in the back of the napkin and candle drawer until its brittle rubber band snaps, then the scattering pips and faces are scooped up and discarded with the coffee grounds and eggshells.
But with new life comes new hope: a new generation rises, hands as yet too small to manipulate the deck, many years of war and go fish away from the required sophistication, but some day, surely....
— J. Daniel Janzen (jdaniel at flakmag dot com)
Euchre