How to Play Double Deck Pinochle

Double Deck Pinochle is a partnership game for four players using 80 cards. You hold 20 of them, bid for the right to name trump, score your melded card combinations, then play 20 tricks trying to make the bid you committed to. The first side to 500 points wins.

It is not the same game as single-deck Pinochle. The deck is different, the meld values are different, and there is no card passing. Anyone arriving from the 48-card game should read the deck and meld sections before playing.

The Deck

80 cards: four identical copies of the Ace, Ten, King, Queen and Jack in each of the four suits. There are no nines. That single omission is the clearest difference from single-deck pinochle and the reason double deck has no dix meld for the nine of trump.

Build it from two pinochle decks with the nines discarded, or from four standard 52-card decks with everything from 2 to 9 removed. Both give the same 80 cards.

Cards rank A, 10, K, Q, J from high to low. The Ten beating the King catches out almost every new player, and it matters constantly because a Ten is also a counter worth a point.

The Deal

Four players sit in fixed partnerships, partners opposite each other. The whole deck is dealt out, 20 cards to each player, and there is no widow, kitty or talon to draw from. Deal in packets of four or five, whichever your table prefers; any pattern that reaches 20 each is fine. Because every card is dealt, nothing new enters the game after the deal, and there is no card passing between partners.

Bidding

The auction decides who names trump and how many points that partnership must score. Bidding starts to the dealer's left and moves clockwise.

• The minimum opening bid is 50.
• Bids rise by 1 up to 60, then in multiples of 5 (65, 70, 75 and so on).
• Each bid must beat the one before it.
• A pass is final. Once you pass you are out of the auction for that hand.
• If the first three players pass, the dealer is stuck with the bid at 50. The dealer cannot pass the hand out.

The bid is a promise about meld and trick points combined, not tricks alone. A partnership bidding 60 must finish the hand with 60 or more from its melds plus the counters it captures, or it is set.

Naming Trump

The high bidder names trump and leads to the first trick. There is one hard restriction: you must hold a marriage, a King and Queen, in the suit you name. If the high bidder holds no marriage in any suit, the hand is not played and their side is set for the amount of the bid. That is a real risk of bidding aggressively on a hand full of aces but short of marriages.

Meld

Meld is scored once trump is named and before the first trick. Each player lays out their combinations, the values are recorded, and the cards return to hand. Partners' melds are scored separately and then added together.

Four points about this table decide most meld disputes:

• Runs are trump only. An A-10-K-Q-J in a plain suit scores nothing beyond the marriage inside it.
• A run contains its royal marriage. Runs and marriages are the same class of meld, so the King and Queen used by the run cannot also score as a separate royal marriage. A second trump King and Queen can.
• Double means two complete copies. A double run is two full A-10-K-Q-J sets in trump, not a run with a spare card attached.
• A card can serve different classes at once. Melds group into runs and marriages, pinochles, and arounds. The Queen of spades can be part of a marriage, a pinochle and queens around simultaneously, but only once within each class.

One row of that table is genuinely disputed. Most published rule sets give triple and quadruple pinochle as 60 and 90, and that is what we use. Some club sheets and at least one encyclopedia give 45 and 300 instead. Both hands are rare enough that you may never meet one, but agree the scale before you start if you are playing somewhere new. Every other value in the table is consistent across the sources we checked.

Note that the multipliers are not uniform. Runs and the four arounds all follow the same series, multiplying by 10, 15 and 20. Pinochle does not: it runs 4, 30, 60, 90. Marriages simply double, triple and quadruple. If a value looks wrong, check it against this table rather than assuming a pattern.

Trick Play

The high bidder leads to the first trick and 20 tricks are played. Double deck pinochle demands far more than following suit:

1. Follow the led suit if you hold it.
2. While following suit you must beat the highest card played so far if you can. This obligation is often called crawling.
3. If you hold the led suit but cannot beat the current winner, play any card of that suit.
4. If you are void in the led suit you must play a trump if you hold one, even one too low to win.
5. Once a trick has been trumped, a later player who is void must overtrump if able.
6. Void in both the led suit and trump, play anything.

The highest trump wins the trick; with no trump played, the highest card of the led suit wins. And because there are four copies of every card, identical cards meet constantly: the copy played first beats the later ones. Playing the second Ace of hearts to a trick loses to the first.

Tables differ on how strictly the crawl rule is enforced. Most double-deck sources, and the tournament game, require you to head the trick whenever you can. Some tables relax it so it only applies when trump is led. Our game uses the strict form.

Scoring

Aces, Tens and Kings are counters worth one point each. There are 48 in the deck, and the last trick is worth 2, so every hand contains exactly 50 trick points. Queens and Jacks count nothing.

Each side adds its meld to its captured counters. If the bidding side reaches its bid, both sides score what they made. If it falls short it is set: it scores nothing at all for the hand, not even its meld, and the full amount of the bid is subtracted from its total. The defending side still keeps everything it earned.

Game is 500 points. If both sides cross 500 on the same hand, the bidding side wins. That rule is universal, not a house convention, and it rewards the side that took the risk.

Quick Reference

Play Double Deck Pinochle against three AI opponents to see the bidding and meld scoring in action. The FAQ covers the questions these rules leave open, and single-deck Pinochle is the 48-card game most players learn first.