Pinochle - The Deck

The Deck

A pinochle deck consists of two copies of each of the 9, 10, jack, queen, king, and ace cards of all four suits, for 48 cards per deck. Aces are always considered high. Pinochle follows a nonstandard card ordering. The complete ordering from highest to lowest is A, 10, K, Q, J, 9. The game can also be played using standard ranking with a simple change to scoring.

Originally, the deck had to be composed by combining two poker, piquet or euchre decks and removing unneeded cards (a piquet deck does not have the 2-6, making it easier to modify, and a euchre deck is exactly half a pinochle deck), but with the game's popularity in the United States in the early 1900s, a single boxed deck with the necessary cards was marketed, and these specialized pinochle decks are now widely available in similar styles to common 52-card counterparts. Variants of pinochle can be played with five, six, eight or more players. These larger variations can combine two pinochle decks called a "double deck". The double deck can also be used when playing with 4 players; hand sizes, average scores and minimum bids are doubled.