Re: Whist Drives
 

Ah .. that's what they got up to. Never could handle the adult whist just the knock out.

Easy: Thirteen cards each, trump card was chosen by splitting the pack.

Hands went down and you had to follow suit and beat the number, Ace being high. If you did twas your win. If you had none of that particular suit, could throw a card of a different suit away, but lost of course. As a trump card always won over the other three suits, the only skill involved was whether to leave these 'til later and throw away a hand earlier. Course the person who had the most number of hands won.

Easy-peasy, but good fun.

Re: Whist Drives
 

Trump selection was actually determined by the tournament (Whist drive) rules, Kate. In addition to the procedure you outline, trumps were determined by rotation -- clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades (the trump rank precedence that was adopted for Contract Bridge and which persists to this day). That was the system used for the St. Matthew's & Mechanics Institute (Burnley) Whist drives I attended and that we used in our family games. Bid Whist was also a popular and intermediary game between original Whist and Contract Bridge, differentiated from the latter by the fact that the bidding contract and play was individual -- no partnerships. Also, the scoring was nowhere as complicated as the Contract Bridge system. We played bid Whist just about every lunch break when I was attending Burnley Municipal College.

There were actually some legal strategies adopted by the better players that enabled partnerships to produce higher scores, for instance: finessing a Queen in an attempt to trap a King or make an otherwise doomed Queen score; signaling a suit lead preference when discarding; describing suit length by high-low play -- all techniques subsequently adopted by Contract Bridge players. Verbal and physical communications relating to play including winks, nods, foot taps, etc., were prohibited and could lead to various penalties depending on tournament or informal rules.

James

Re: Whist Drives
 

Whist and the dozens of variations on whist were extremely popular on board ship, together with Uckers and of course Crib.

There was the basic whist, Nomination Whist, Knockout Whist, Contract Whist, German Whist, Open German Whist and Sergeant Major (the only whist game for 3 players and it was never ending). Then there was the daddy of them all Contract Bridge.

Does anyone play Auction Bridge anymore?