Auction Pitch
Auction Pitch is played in exactly the same way as simple Pitch, except that instead of eldest hand the highest bidder pitches, and the highest bidder must reach the number of scoring points bid or is set back.
Beginning with eldest hand, each player gets one chance to bid for the privilege of declaring the trump suit. A bid is the number of points that the bidder undertakes to win in the deal, the minimum bid being 1. Each player must make a higher bid than the previous player, or pass. 4, the highest possible bid, is known as shoot the moon, slam or smudge. If no player bids, the deal is abandoned and the same dealer deals again. The player who wins the bid, known as the pitcher or maker, must win as many points as he or she bid. The pitcher pitches, i.e. leads to the first trick and thereby establishes the trump suit (as the suit of the card led).
A player who can follow suit but discards a card of a different non-trump suit is punished for the revoke by being set back by the value of the bid.
Players may receive points even if they did not win the auction. A pitcher who did not win at least the number of points undertaken with the bid does not receive any of the points, and is instead set back by the amount of the bid. Negative scores are possible.
It may happen that at the end of a deal more than one player reaches the number of points necessary to win the game. In this case the order in which the points are rewarded becomes crucial: Any points won by the pitcher are counted first. Thereafter the remaining points are awarded in the order as listed above, i.e. first High, then Low, then Jack, then Game.
Scores can be kept on paper, in which case negative numbers may be marked by circles. (A player with a negative score is said to be "in the hole".) Alternatively, each player may begin with as many counters as are needed to win the game, and get rid of one for each point won.
All Fours and its variants have always been used as gambling games, and according to John McLeod, cutthroat Pitch is probably still popular for this purpose at the American coasts. If the game is played with a pool, each player initially pays a fixed amount into the pool. A player who is set back for failing to win as many points as bid for, or for a revoke, also has to pay the same amount into the pool. The winner of the game receives the contents of the pool.
Read more about this topic: Pitch (card Game)
Famous quotes containing the words auction and/or pitch:
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“I can’t earn my own living. I could never make anything turn into money. It’s like making fires. A careful assortment of paper, shavings, faggots and kindling nicely tipped with pitch will never light for me. I have never been present when a cigarette butt, extinct, thrown into a damp and isolated spot, started a conflagration in the California woods.”
—Margaret Anderson (1886–1973)