Whist Rules

Whist has no bidding phase, no widow, and no melding — it's the trick-taking game other, more elaborate ones (Bridge, Spades, Euchre) were all built on top of, and stripped down to its core mechanics, it's arguably the simplest classic card game on this site to actually learn, even though generations of serious players have written entire books analyzing how to play it well.

Setup and Dealing

Deal a full standard 52-card deck evenly among four players, fixed into two partnerships sitting across from each other — 13 cards each, nothing held back, no widow. The dealer turns the final card dealt (their own last card) face up to determine trump for the hand; that card stays visible until the dealer's first turn to play, then joins their hand normally.

Playing the Hand

Play opens with the player seated to the dealer's left. Everyone must follow the suit led if able; if a player can't follow suit, they may play any card, including a trump. Whoever plays the highest card of the led suit wins the trick, unless someone trumped it, in which case the highest trump played wins instead. Whoever wins a trick leads the next one — there is no bidding to consult and no meld to lay down; the entire hand plays out purely through trick-by-trick decisions.

Scoring

Traditional Whist scoring is refreshingly simple: each partnership counts the tricks they won past the first six (the first six tricks won by either side don't score at all — this baseline is called the "book"), and each trick beyond six is worth one point. Games are typically played to a target such as 5 or 7 points, across as many hands as it takes to get there, with the deal rotating each hand.

Honours: The Scoring Variant Most Tables Skip

The traditional, more complete version of Whist also scores honours — the Ace, King, Queen, and Jack of the trump suit. If a partnership holds three of these four cards between their two hands (regardless of who wins any tricks with them), they score 2 extra points; all four scores 4. This layer rewards being dealt strong trump cards independent of how the hand is actually played, and it's the single most common thing modern casual Whist tables have quietly dropped without realizing it was ever part of the standard rules — most players today have only ever played the trick-scoring half of the game.

Where Whist Came From

Whist evolved gradually in England from earlier trick-taking games recorded as far back as 1529 under the name "trump," passing through "ruff," "ruff and honours," and "whisk and swabbers" before settling into "whist" by the 18th century — the name itself comes from an older word meaning quiet or attentive, the same root as "wistful." The game was first codified seriously by a group of gentlemen players meeting at the Crown Coffee House in London around 1728, and Edmond Hoyle's 1742 treatise on Whist became the standard reference text for the next century, giving the language the phrase "according to Hoyle" for anything played strictly by the rules.

Whist's Living Descendants

Nearly every major partnership trick-taking game played today owes something direct to Whist's core structure: Bridge added a bidding phase and a dummy hand on top of essentially the same trick-taking skeleton, Spades fixed the trump suit permanently instead of turning up a card, and Euchre shrank the deck and reworked trump entirely while keeping Whist's basic follow-suit, highest-card-wins mechanics intact. Learning plain Whist first is still a reasonable way to understand the shared foundation underneath several of the more popular games this site covers.

The Arguments This Game Actually Produces

The most common modern dispute is simply whether honours are even being scored, since so many tables have only ever learned the trick-counting half of the game. A second common argument is whether the dealer's turned-up trump card can be used normally once picked back into the hand, or whether some symbolic restriction applies to it (it can be played completely normally — the face-up display is purely informational). See the full dispute breakdown, the scoring deep-dive, and a printable trick-and-honours tracker.

Questions People Still Ask Mid-Game

Is there any bidding in Whist at all? No — this is the defining difference from Bridge and most modern trick-taking games; trump is set purely by the card turned up at the deal, with no bidding phase before or after.

Do all 13 tricks matter, or only the ones past six? All 13 are played out normally; it's only the scoring that ignores the first six per side, treating them as a baseline "book" that has to be exceeded before points start counting.

Can a partnership refuse to play their turned-up trump card style hand and ask for a redeal? No — the dealer's final card determines trump for that hand regardless of whether it favors their side; there's no mechanism in standard Whist to reject a deal once it's made.