Chris Moneymaker’s victory in the 2003 WSOP Main Event catapulted poker into the mainstream spotlight and saw the game of Texas Hold ‘Em spread like wildfire. Playing cards however, was a part of my life long before the poker boom. I grew up playing card games with my family since I was in elementary school. At any family get-together, holiday, or vacation, we would all gather around the kitchen table after dinner and play cards.

While poker was rarely played in any of these games, I have fond memories of the competition and time together. Today I want to talk about some of those other card games.

Scat Card Game

One of the first games I ever learned, and still one of my favorites, is Scat (or 31). Scat is played with each player being dealt three cards face-down with the goal to get 31 points of the same suit. Aces are worth 11, Face-Cards 10, and all others their numeric value. Players draw and discard in clockwise order until a player knocks the table, indicating one more round of draws.

After these draws, players reveal their hands with typically the lowest half of scores losing the round. We played with every player getting 3 “lives” and losing a life with each lost round. I always enjoyed the cumulative nature of this game and the excitement as the field was whittled down and my aunts, uncles, and cousins were eliminated and relegated to spectating as we played down to the ultimate winner. 

The Hearts Card Game

And while Scat was a family favorite, it was typically only a warm-up for the main event: Hearts. Hearts is a four-player game with a number of rules and subtleties. However, the gist of the game is that each heart is worth 1 point, the Queen of Spades worth 13 points, and the idea is to take as few points as possible. Games in my family were typically played to 75 or 100, and often involved some heated arguments!

My favorite mechanic of Hearts is the ability to shoot the moon, where if a player can take all 26 points in any given hand, he or she adds 26 to all players’ scores. A total boom-or-bust strategy, the most interesting rounds of Hearts to me always involve someone trying to shoot the moon. When I played Hearts a little later in life at a higher level, I realized that a huge part of the game was shooting the moon and stopping your opponents from doing so.

Family Ties

I can’t talk about playing card games at home without mentioning my late grandmother. One of the most adept card players in my family, she was a fierce competitor and had a passion for all kinds of games. Willing to do anything to win, she was kind enough to introduce me to angle-shooting at a young age. Pictured below is me and my grandmother playing one of our favorite two-player games, Honeymoon Bridge. This game involved taking turns drawing sets of two cards off the deck to build a hand, having to choose the first card or gamble and take the mystery second card, and then bidding Bridge style to play out the hand.

For some reason, my grandmother always seemed to get the cards stuck together while drawing and ending up with the added information of the mystery card before making her decision. Funny how that worked. 

As I got older the card games I played continued to change and evolve. Hearts was often replaced with Spades, another four-player game but with teams, in family home games. And in high school, my friends favored quicker games like Acey-Deucey or Guts. Naturally we shifted to Texas Hold ‘Em during the 2003 World Series of Poker and the rest is history, but I do still enjoy mixing it up with non-poker games on off times around the poker tournament season.

Regardless of the game, and whether gambling is involved or not, sitting down to play cards with friends and family will always be one of my favorite pastimes.