Karen said if I was going to put our rules on the computer I had better write them all down properly, so that's what this is. If you play a little differently at your house, that's fine. Everybody does. These are the rules that have held up at our table for thirty-five years, and I'll stand behind every one of them.

A pinochle deck is 48 cards: two each of the ace, ten, king, queen, jack and nine in every suit. For double-deck, put two pinochle decks together and pull out all sixteen nines. That leaves 80 cards, with four of every card.

In every suit the cards rank, from high to low:

The ten ranks right under the ace. Every new person at our table plays a king on a ten at least once and looks surprised. Then they don't do it again.

Four players, two teams, partners sitting across the table from each other. Everything goes around to the left: the deal, the bidding and the play.

The dealer shuffles, the player on the right cuts, and the dealer deals the whole deck out four cards at a time, so everybody has twenty cards. Eighty cards make a thick deck to shuffle. Split it in half and shuffle each half, then shuffle them together. Louise can do the whole thing at once, but Louise has hands like a card dealer in Las Vegas, and the rest of us don't.

• The player to the dealer's left bids first, then around to the left.
• The bid is how many points you think your side can make on the hand, your meld plus your trick points together.
• The lowest bid is 50. Each bid has to be higher than the last one. We go up by ones until 60, and after 60 by fives: 65, 70, 75 and so on.
• You can pass instead of bidding. Once you pass, you're out of the bidding for that hand.
• When three players have passed, the one left has the bid. If the first three all pass, the dealer is stuck with it at 50. We call that getting "dumped on," and it happens to Rich more than anybody.
• The high bidder names the trump suit, and must hold a king and queen of that suit. No marriage, no trump.

How do you know what to bid? Count your meld, then guess what your partner has, then guess what you'll take in tricks. After thirty-five years I still guess wrong about once a night. If you're new, bid on what's in your hand and not on what you hope your partner has.

After trump is named, the bidder and the bidder's partner each pick three cards and pass them face down to each other, at the same time. You can't look at what you're getting before you pick what you're giving.

The partner should pass the bidder good cards in trump, and aces. The bidder should pass back whatever won't help him, usually cards from a short suit. This is where good partners earn their keep.

Lots of families don't pass at all, and some pass four. Grandpa never passed in his life, and said so every Sunday from 1964 until 1987.

Now everybody lays their meld face up on the table, counts it out loud, and the scorekeeper writes down each side's total. Then you pick your cards back up and play. Here's the chart:

The rules of meld:

• Your meld has to be in your own hand. You can't put half a marriage with your partner's half.
• There are three kinds of meld: runs and marriages; pinochles; and the "arounds." A card can be in one meld of each kind, but never in two melds of the same kind. So the queen of spades can be in a marriage, a pinochle and queens around all at once, but it can't make two pinochles with two different jacks of diamonds.
• The king and queen in your run are part of the run. They don't also count as a royal marriage. If you have another king and queen of trump, those count as a royal marriage.
• A run in any suit but trump isn't a run. It's just a marriage.
• Tens are worth nothing in meld.
• Our rule: you have to take a trick to save your meld. If your side doesn't take one trick in the play, your meld doesn't count.

Here's how you count a hand. This is Ron's hand last Sunday after the pass, hearts trump:

See how the jack of hearts is in the run and also in jacks around, and the jack of diamonds is in the pinochle and also in jacks around? Different kinds of meld, so they count in both. No kings around, because there's no king of spades or diamonds. Ron had bid 60, and between his 39, my meld and the tricks, we made it with room to spare. The three cards I passed him had something to do with that. I'm just saying.

The bidder leads the first trick. Everybody plays one card, going to the left. Whoever wins the trick leads the next one. Here are the rules for what you have to play, and they're strict:

1. Follow suit if you can.
2. When you follow suit, you have to play a card that beats the best one on the trick, if you have one. If you can't beat it, play any card of the suit.
3. If you can't follow suit, you have to trump.
4. If somebody has already trumped, and you have to trump too, you have to play a higher trump if you've got one. If the trick has been trumped and you can still follow suit, just follow suit. Any card of the suit will do, since none of them can win anymore.
5. If you have no cards of the suit led and no trump, play anything.
6. When two of the very same card are played to a trick, the first one played wins.

When the trick is won, the winning side keeps the cards face down. At the end of the hand you count up the counters: every ace, ten and king is worth one point. Queens and jacks are worth nothing. There are 48 counters in the deck, and whoever takes the last trick gets 2 more. That makes 50 points in the play, every hand, always. If your two sides don't add up to 50, somebody counted wrong. It's usually Rich.

• Add each side's meld and trick points together.
• If the bidding side made its bid (meld plus tricks at least as much as the bid), both sides add their points to their scores.
• If the bidding side didn't make it, they're set. They get nothing for the hand, and the amount of the bid comes off their score. You can go below zero. We've all been there. The other side still adds its points.
• Throwing it in. If the bidders can see after the meld that they can't possibly make it, they can throw in the hand without playing it. They still lose the bid, and the other side gets its meld but no trick points. Sometimes that's the smart thing to do. Rich never thinks so.
• Game is 500 on Sunday nights, and 300 at the Labor Day tournament so everybody's done before evening chores.
• The bidder goes out first. If both sides go over the top on the same hand, the bidding side wins.

We keep score on a pad by the sugar bowl, with a column for each side, and a running total under every hand. The winner of each game gets a mark in the score book. You can see the whole score book, all thirty-five years of it, on the front page.