Trick-taking Game - Contracts and Auctions

Contracts and Auctions

In a contract game the winning and scoring conditions are not fixed but are chosen by one of the players after seeing their hand. In such games, players make bids depending on the number of tricks or card points they believe they can win during play of the hand. One or more of these bids stands as the contract, and the player who made that bid is rewarded for meeting it or penalized for not meeting it.

In auction games, bidding players are competing against each other for the right to attempt to make the contract. In a few games, the contract is fixed (normally a simple majority, less often based on certain cards captured during play) and players' bids are a wager of game points to be won or lost. In others, the bid is a number of tricks or card points the bidder is confident that they or their partnership will take. Either of these can also include the suit to be used as trumps during the hand. The highest bid becomes the contract and the highest bidder is the contractor, known in some games as the declarer or taker, who then plays either with or without a partner. The other players become opponents, whose main goal is to prevent the contract being met. Popular examples include Contract bridge, Pinochle, tarot games, Skat, Belote and Twenty-Eight. In many auction games the eldest hand leads to the first trick, regardless of who won the auction, but in some, such as Contract Bridge, the first lead is made by the player next in rotation after the contractor, so that the contractor plays last to that trick.

In precision or exact-prediction games, all players choose their winning condition independently: to win precisely a predicted number of tricks (Oh Hell) or card points (Differenzler). Each player's bid stands (in partnership games the partners' bids are often combined), and each player or partnership then tries to take exactly the number of tricks or points they bid, and are rewarded or penalized for doing so independently of anyone else's success or failure in meeting their bid. This type of game began to mature in the 20th century. Other games generally falling into the exact-prediction category are Spades and Ninety-Nine.