Rules and Hoyles

It is widely assumed that every card game has official rules specifying the only right way to play. This is like saying that there is only one correct form of a language and that all dialects are invalid. In fact, the vast majority of card games are folk games. Like dialects, they vary from region to region, sometimes from village to village, and they may change with time and be in a constant state of development, though it is true that some card games are inherently resistant to change—a notable example being cribbage, which has hardly changed in 400 years.

Games acquire official rules only when they become popular enough to be played in clubs and tournaments that attract players from widely different regions. It then becomes necessary to ensure that competitors from different “dialect” areas follow a set of rules codified in advance rather than having to negotiate each game as it is played. Where official rules exist, therefore, they are to be taken as the official rules of a particular governing body rather than those of the game itself. Bridge is one of the few games whose official rules, as promulgated by the World Bridge Federation, are universally followed. More commonly, official rules exist alongside local rules. Poker, for example, is equipped with agreed-upon rules in casinos and international tournaments but throughout the world continues to be played domestically in thousands of variations, some uniquely local and temporal, as in the play of dealer’s choice.

Official rules are often credited to a fictitious authority called Hoyle. This name derives from the English whist tutor Edmond Hoyle, whose A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist (1742) proved successful enough to elicit sequels (some far from authoritative) on other popular games of his day. Success also led to his being plagiarized and his books’ being pirated by his contemporaries and subsequently to the habit of attaching his name to any collection of rules of games, regardless of who wrote them or what their own authority was—a practice that persists in the United States, though not in Hoyle’s native country, where his name is considered old-fashioned and irrelevant.

What most people mean by “official rules” is a clear description of how a particular game is played—the sequence of activities that define and distinguish one game from another. Such defining rules must be distinguished from procedural rules, which govern the corrections and penalties for mistakes and breaches of etiquette and constitute the bulk of any set of tournament rules, and from rules of strategy, designed to be helpful rather than mandatory. Given such distinctions, it is perhaps ironic that Hoyle himself never wrote a clear description of how any particular game was played. Taking for granted that everyone already knew the defining rules of a game, he had only an interest in outlining the strategy for playing it well and in compiling tables of odds for gambling—for onlookers as well as players.