Beggar My Neighbor

Beggar My Neighbor is a British card game that may date back to a late-16th-century card game known as Knave Out of Doors, which was mentioned in a 1604 play, A Woman Killed with Kindness, by John Haywood. Regardless of when it originated, it was a very popular game by the 19th century. It has also been known as Strip Jack Naked, Beat Your Neighbor Out of Doors, Corsi-can Battle, Egyptian War, and Egyptian Ratkiller. The “Egyptian” versions have added rules allowing slapping the stack when certain combinations show up, allowing the “slapping” player to gather up the stack. There is also a variation played in the Caribbean known as Suck the Well Dry. The main difference in this variation is that when there are more than two players, the sequence of play is counterclockwise, as opposed to the clockwise sequence played in the United States and Great Britain.

As can be inferred from the different names, this game has been given, it is a zero-sum, or constant-sum, game in which winning depends on defeating the opponent and taking everything they have.

The game is usually played by two players, although sometimes there are more. The deck is divided evenly between the players who keep the cards in face-down piles. Aces, kings, queens, and jacks are known as “pay cards.” The other cards are considered “ordinary cards.” The players take turns placing the top card from their stack face up in the center of the table. When they place an ordinary card, face up, on the stack, nothing happens. When a player places a pay card, the other player must pay a number of cards out, the number depending on the pay card. The rate is four cards for an ace, three for a king, two for a queen, and one for a jack. The player who played the pay card then takes all of these, as well as all of the cards in the stack. If, however, the paying player plays a pay card, then the player who originally played the pay card must pay cards, and the stack reverts to the player who played the second pay card. The game continues in this fashion until one player completely runs out of cards.

The game most famously appears in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, when Pip plays and loses a game of Beggar My Neighbor to Estella while Miss Havisham looks on, encouraging Estella to “Beggar him!” In the novel, it is used as more than a card game, as it shows a great deal about the characters. Further, it also provides an analogy for Miss Havisham's past, with its financial and personal failures and total loss. Literary critics have also discussed it as a further analogy for the difficulties and failures of financial enterprises in Victorian England.

Beggar My Neighbor is a game of pure chance, with no element of skill involved. Theoretically, it is possible that a game of Beggar My Neighbor could be played forever without a player winning, a subject that has been written about in mathematical journals.

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