Kick-off

I love playing cards. These days, poker is all the rage, but there are other card games. Much has been written about Bridge, Hearts, Spades, and Rummy. They are all fine card games but none of them has the simple excitement of Euchre. Plus none of them have dedicated bar leagues near me where you can play week after week while you knock back a few discount beers.

I went through a phase where I was losing to players I thought inferior to me. That convinced me that the game must be all luck. To figure out for sure, I put together a computer program and used game theory to figure out all the odds and best strategies. I also wanted to create a simple strategy that my partner would buy into. I came up with a simple point system and am now convinced that you can overcome the "luck" factor if you play excellent strategy. That's why I'm writing about euchre.

How Do You Play?
It seems appropriate in the first post to give the rules of euchre. I could go through and create a big entry on it all, but people have already done that. Check out the following links to learn how to play the game.

http://www.bright.net/~double/euchre.htm

Decent write-up of the rules but the site layout isn’t easy to read. Also, ignore the rules of thumb for the moment. Some of the things suggested are just not right.

http://home.cwru.edu/~mjs2/euchre.html

The rules section on this site is pretty good. Here in Chicago, we always use a 6 card and 4 card to keep score. Forget their “special rules” for the moment. And the strategy stuff they have is pretty basic but not always right. In future entries I’ll lay out a more effective strategy.

Remember rules are regional. There are lots of variations depending on who you are playing with. Take heart. We'll adapt our strategy to factor in different rules.