Ecarté

Ecarté is a trick-taking card game, typically played by two people using a 32-card deck with all cards between two and six removed. In Ecarté, the ace ranks between the 10 and the jack, leaving the king as the highest-ranked card. As in Euchre, trump is determined at the beginning of each hand, but in Ecarté, the card values remain the same when trump. Ecarté gets its name (literally, “discarded”) from its unusual system of proposing and discarding. After the cards are dealt, the non-dealer has the opportunity to trade cards from his or her hand with cards in the deck by proposing to the dealer. If the dealer accepts, then both players may trade in any number of cards from their hands. This process continues until either the nondealer is satisfied with the hand or the dealer refuses the proposal.

Ecarté developed from a game called Triomphe, but should not be conflated with the Triomphe referred to frequently in texts by French writers as far back as the 15th century. Although it shares the same name as the Ecarté predecessor, the term triomphe (meaning triumph, from which we get the word trump) likely indicated an entire class of trick-taking games with a trump system that eventually codified into the ancestors of later games such as Euchre, Loo, Whist, and Ecarté. A text from the 17th century describes a four-person game played with a 52-card deck called Triomphe that was ubiquitous in France. In the 18th century, Triomphe referred to a two-person game played with a modified deck that developed into the modern version of Ecarté in the 19th century.

Despite its relative obscurity in the 21st century, Ecarté was widely popular in both Europe and the United States in the 19th century. Although the game requires a fair amount of skill, its chance elements and fast-paced game play made Ecarté widely popular as a gambling game. During the Restoration period in France, after the battle of Waterloo, Ecarté became extremely fashionable in Paris salons and casinos. In 1820, Ecarté was introduced to the United States, and although the game never achieved the status in the United States that Euchre acquired, the game was prevalent enough to be the subject of several treatises written by American authors.

Most of these authors, writing near the turn of the 20th century, decried the gambling aspect of Ecarté and the tendency of many players to cheat at the game. Overturning the king when deciding trump or merely possessing the king of trumps immediately scores the player a point, a fact undoubtedly taken advantage of by experienced cardsharps. Despite the censure by these writers of Ecarté's association with gambling, they all assert that the game is enjoyable for its simple rules and capacity to be played by amateurs and experts alike. These same authors attempted to highlight Ecarté as a “scientific” [Page 190]game that could be exhaustively explored through statistical analysis and probabilities. They formulated a set of hands that would likely win three tricks, termed jeux de règle, on which the player should bid.

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