Progressive euchre is euchre for a crowd. Everybody plays for himself, but you play with a different partner every round.

We set up as many tables as we need, four players each, and number them. Table 1 is the head table, by the coffee. You draw your starting seat out of a coffee can. Each round is eight hands. You don't play to ten; you just play the eight hands, and after every hand each player writes down on his own score card how many tricks his side took. When the eight hands are done, the two winners at each table move up one table, the two losers stay, and everybody splits up from his partner. At the head table it's the other way around: the winners stay and the losers go down to the last table.

Eight rounds of eight hands. At the end you add up your card. Most tricks wins. If you go alone and take all five, you get a star on your card, and stars break ties. The most anybody could ever get is 320. Nobody ever has. A good night is a little over two hundred.

It's five dollars to play. Half the pot goes to first, thirty percent to second, twenty to third. The Auxiliary sells sloppy joes in the kitchen.

296 players in all over nine tournaments. July is always light. Everybody's up north.

I am not going to make a big thing out of this.

Forty players, ten tables, the biggest crowd of the year. I started at table 7. I had two loners, both in the sixth round, both with Margo across from me laying her cards down, and both took all five. My 214 is the best score at the Legion this year, which I only mention because it's true and this is a results page. First prize was a hundred dollars, and it went for a new set of tires on my wife's Buick, which she will tell you was her idea.

Hazel F. was second with 206, her second second-place finish of the year, to go with two firsts and a third. Keith A., who is one of the men I eat lunch with, was third. He would like it on record that in the third round, at table 4, he and his partner took six of the eight hands off me and mine. They did. That is now on record.

All right. It's a big thing.

Three points for first, two for second, one for third. Whoever's on top after December gets the plaque in the front hall and buys the first round at the Christmas party. That's how we do it.

Nine tournaments, six points a night, fifty-four points handed out. It adds up. I checked it twice.

Hazel F. is sixty-nine years old and she learned to play from her father in a deer camp in the Upper Peninsula. She has finished in the top three five times out of nine this year. She plays every hand like it's the last hand of the night and she never says one word, and if you sit down across from her you will find out what a good partner is. Three tournaments left. Somebody's going to have to catch her, and I don't know who.