The other day we were having a great session of rook. The first time my original group of 4 people had played in over 2 years. You know…life happens. At any rate, it wasn’t the most competitive of sessions as we were too busy catching up on how everyone was doing. What’s new in life, who got married, who had kids, who is having grand-kids…the norm.
So during the match we played, twice I was dealt some of the worst hands I could ever imagine. Back to back, I was dealt 13 cards, none of which were over 12, and I only had one point card each time. The first had I was dealt one 10 and the second hand I was dealt one 5. Our requirements for a redeal in rook (since we play with the 2s 3s and 4s) is all cards must be 12 or under and you have no point cards. People have different requirements for redeal. Some do not even play with the redeal option at all. It is so rare that we sort of like it.
The hands I was actually dealt though happened to be even worse than a redeal hand since I was forced to play them and I had no way of cluing my partner in that my hand was horrendous. The only thing I could do was remove myself from the bidding early on, but the way the bidding went, it was not obvious how completely terrible I was sitting.
In fact, since my hand was so bad, it meant that everyone else’ hand was actually very good, including my partners. So my partner bid strong thinking that if I could just help in a few places or the kitty filled in a hole or two, we would be fine. Of course, I did not take a single trick. And since I didn’t have but one point card each round, the opponents had a lot of point cards they could play on each other.
Needless to say, we did not win those rounds and got set pretty convincingly. While we were just 100 points away from victory before these two games, we dropped all the back to being down more than 400 pts. Luckily for us, our opposition was a bit rusty as well and we were able to set them back to -500 with some pretty ugly sets…including two rounds where trump was called by our opponents and I look down to see 6 of the trump cards ready for setting.
Since we had such a lead on them, we ended up winning the match for the night. I just took a lot longer than it should have. Yeah for another session of rook with the old crew!
Do you ever have those nights where the cards are just making really strange games? A lot more setting than normal. Some nights you can finish a round to 500 pts in an hour. Some nights it takes almost 3 hours. This night was one of those longer sessions.