Talk:Belote

To merge or not, some background info

The "Bridge-Belote" game, as played in Bulgaria, definitely descends from French Belote and is a close relative of Croatian Bela. There are some differences, though (I compare to these rules):

• There is no face-up card in the bidding phase. Anyone is free to bid anything, as far as it is higher than the current best bid.
• A carré (four of a kind) is not higher than a quint (a five-card sequence). They can co-exist peacefully.
• Arbitration of declarations is done after the last trick, and the cards included in declarations are never shown during the first trick.
• Undertrumping (French: pisser) is not required.
• A game does not end at 1000 points, but ends at 151 rounded-up points (the result of each dealing is divided by 10).

There could be more. Note also, that the rules described in Belote (Bulgaria) are not complete (my fault), e.g. "hanging results" and "arbitration of declarations" (or whatever they should be called) are missing.

As the similarities are more than the differences, I'd support creating a common description for the "Belote family of games", either as a separate article, or as a section within Belote. If the differences are not sufficient for Belote (Bulgaria) to exist, I wouldn't mind it becoming just another section of Belote, but I believe there will eventually come up enough of them. Note, that versions of Belote are played in other communities as well (AFAIK Serbs, Armenians, Jews), possibly with local specifics.

There has been a discussion in bg.wikipedia recently about how belote and bridge-belote should be interwikied. It was suggested that belote is an equivalent of "skambil" (Bulgarian: скамбил, I don't know what exactly it is...) and bridge-belote (which is locally known simply as belote) is the French "Coinche".

Btw, the "strategy" section needs expansion. The "cheating" section needs cleanup — some of the stuff there is common for all card games. It would also be nice to have an "Etiquette" section, not to leave the impression that Belote cannot be played honestly.

--Cameltrader 11:58, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

• Some of the differences you list are also present in some variants of the French belote: undertrumping is not always required, and the number of poins needed to win can vary. If there are no other differences, I think we should merge the articles, and have a section "regional differences": a section on the Bulgarian variant would only be five lines long, according to your list. The main features, such as the ordering of the cards and counting the points, are the same. Coinche is a different game, in which you have to declare how many points you will score (e.g. "120 points, trump Hearts", and a higher bid would be "130 points, trump Spades"). Pruneau^talk 13:35, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

  Personally, I wouldn't oppose. Let's wait some more, maybe a week, so that others can express their opinion. I'll post a link at the Bulgarian talk page mentioned above, and call for a discussion here. It would be nice to get info from people living in other countries too — in this case we should get the lowest common denominator for a shared "Rules" paragraph. Btw, I haven't read yet the Wikipedia policy about mergers, but it would be good to start copying and adjusting the "Rules" into this page. It needs to be done anyway. --Cameltrader 18:20, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

  OK, no objections, so I start moving the contents of Belote (Bulgaria) into Belote. --Cameltrader 10:44, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Expansion of "Rules"

The article's content was merged from Belote (Bulgaria), now a redirect. The "Rules" section needs to be expanded with local rules, as played in other countries, and Bulgarian-only rules need to be marked as such. The rules about "hanging results" and "arbitration of declarations" (not sure about the right terminology) should be added. --Cameltrader 11:55, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

I'll add information on the French rules next week, using fr:Belote. Thanks for doing the merge, great job! Pruneau^talk 14:00, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

68.233.154.102's edits

I reverted the replacement of "preceeding" with "left", and of "following" with "right". Note, that belote is sometimes played clockwise.

The paragraph about the "face-up card in the middle" should be merged into the "Bidding" section. This is a major difference between versions of belote — some use bridge-like bidding, others form take-it-or-not contracts. I deleted the paragraph because it was copy-pasted from http://www.pagat.com/jass/belote.html

In which language are these: "An-khos", "Dip-khos"? --Cameltrader 16:07, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Jass group of card games

John McLeod has Belote listed as one of the 'Jass Group of card games on his excellent website [1]. This seems a natural grouping, as each game has the jack and nine as the highest trumps, some oddity unlikely to originate twice independently. The games seem to have their origin in the 1600s in the Netherlands, when and where "Jos" was a name for the "Jack" and a peasant in general. The group contains Klaverjas (translates to Jack of clubs), Jass, Clabber, Clobyosh or Bela or Belot, Belote, Pilotta, Twenty-eight, Tarabish, perhaps Belata, and a number of games without entries in wikipedia. It appears as if Belote, introduced to France in the 1930s [2], is becoming the catch-all for these games, slowly claiming Klaverjas, Belot, and others. Bela (or marriage) apparently indicates the bonus for having a king and queen of a suite in hand, a feature shared with a wider group of card games (games), itself a subgroup of the ace-ten group of point-trick games. I wonder if this grouping would be considered copyrighted by McLeod. Otherwise it would be a very useful structure to organize the wikipedia cardgames entries in. — 209.124.189.39 02:41, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

J9A10 is a game very similar to the JASS games it is the World's First Online game which lets users play the card game 56 and other variants online.

A little bit about strategy

Like many card games that use tricks, in belote the various team members use signaling. A player's action signals to his teammates which cards or suits they have or don't have. This may have a significant influence on the course of the game. Statement is crucial as it uses as a target to one team to achieve and the other to prevent (More on Belote strategy). 82.166.235.105 (talk) 07:54, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Confusing article layout

This is mentioned as a French card game but the first set of rules is how to play a similar game in Bulgaria. Then follows a section on "French Rules". Shouldn't this article logically have the French rules first? I only came to this article because the game is mentioned in "Le règle du jeu" (Jean Renoir, 1939) and had no idea what kind of card game this was/is. Also, since this an English language article, shouldn't this sentence: "If following is impossible, then a trump must be played. Overtrumping is obligatory, except when the current trick winner is the partner. In Bulgaria this is called "да минеш метър."" have an English translation for "да минеш метър."?Jtyroler (talk) 11:30, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Inconsistent explanation in Following Rules

Rule 2. in the Play section reads:

If the dominant suit is a trump suit, a higher-ranking card must be played, except if playing on a non-trump contract, or when following a non-trump suit in a suit-trump contract.

The two exceptions seem to me in conflict with the main rule:

• the dominant suit can't be trump suit when playing on a non-trump contract
• following a non-trump suit in a suit-trump contract is impossible if the dominant suit is a trump suit already

Unless there's a flaw in the logic above, it should read just 'If the dominant suit is a trump suit, a higher-ranking card must be played.' — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.118.193.178 (talk) 19:29, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Declarations

Could somebody update the declarations section to indicate when declarations count for the team that made them, and when they are not counted. Due to oppononts making a larger declaration (also the first? Higher Suit?) I would like to knbow the rules about this event but cannot find them anywhere. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.90.252.109 (talk) 13:49, 17 October 2013 (UTC)