Pitch (card Game)

Pitch (card Game)

Pitch is an American trick-taking card game derived from the English game of All Fours (Seven Up). Historically, Pitch started as "Blind All Fours", a very simple All Fours variant that is still played in England as a pub game. The modern game involving a bidding phase and setting back a party's score if the bid is not reached came up in the middle of the 19th century and is more precisely known as Auction Pitch or Setback. Pitch was allegedly invented by eight men during a deer hunting trip in Mayfield, Kentucky. One of the eight men, Ernest Ray Cole, reported that the men were snowed in during the hunting trip in a log cabin and had nothing better to do with themselves. Ernest, though a boy at the time, was likely in attendance with his father, Pleasant Grant Cole and possibly on the property of Robert or Thomas Cole, brothers who at one time had adjacent properties in the latter half of the 19th century (Reference = Mayfield County Property Records and Deeds, Clerk of Courts, Mayfield, KY). Unlike most Kentucky winters, the hunters could not hunt at dusk or dawn because the weather was so bad that it was "pitch black" (as black as tar pitch from a tree) outside most of the time, and difficult to see even when the sun did shine. Hence the name of the game "pitch."

Whereas All Fours started as a two-player game, Pitch is most popular for three to five players. Four can play individually or in fixed partnerships, depending in part on regional preferences. Auction Pitch is played in numerous variations that vary the deck used, provide methods for improving players' hands, or expand the scoring system. Some of these variants gave rise to a new game known as Pedro or Cinch.