How to play Tressette in due (Spizzichino)
The rules of Spizzichino, and a game played out one move at a time.
Tressette in due is Tressette for two players, and Spizzichino is its other name. Here are the rules: you take tricks for the points in them, add bonus points for combinations of 3s, 2s and aces, and the first to the target wins. Press play and we deal one hand, stopping to say what happened and why.
Press play and we deal a short game of Spizzichino on the real table. It stops on every move and says what just happened and what you could do next.
Two names, one game
Pagat, John McLeod's card games site, glosses Tressette in due as Tressette for Two and files Spizzichino under the same page. It suggests the name comes from pizzicare, to pluck. You will also see Tressette spelled Tresette. What changes from the four-person game is that nobody is your partner, so there are no signals, and you draw a card from a stock after every trick.
What you need
Take an ordinary 52-card deck and remove the 8s, 9s and 10s. The forty cards left are the Italian deck, in French suits. In every suit the order, high to low, is 3, 2, ace, king, queen, jack, 7, 6, 5, 4. No suit is trump. A 3 beats an ace.
Cards carry a point value as well as a rank. An ace is one point. Each 3, 2, king, queen and jack is a third of a point, and the 7 down to the 4 are worth nothing. The last trick of the hand is a whole point too.
The deal
The dealer gives ten cards to each of you, five at a time, and stacks the other twenty face down as the stock, called the monte. The dealer's opponent leads the first trick. The deal changes hands every hand, and the first dealer is picked at random. The table shuffles, so nobody cuts.
A trick
Whoever leads plays any card. The other must follow suit if they can, and may throw anything if they cannot. The higher card of the suit led wins. A card of another suit never wins, however high, and nobody has to beat the card led. The winner leads next.
Say you lead the king of spades and their only spade is the queen. They have to play it, and your king wins, with two thirds of a point in the trick. Now say you lead the 4 of diamonds and they have no diamonds, so they throw the ace of clubs on it. Your 4 still wins, and the ace goes into your pile, a whole point.
The draw
After every trick, while the stock lasts, the winner takes the top card first and shows it to their opponent, then the loser takes the next card and shows that one. So you know the cards they drew and still hold, and they know yours. Those are cards in their hand you can name, so keep track of them. The table keeps them face up in their row, labelled as drawn and shown to you, and labels the cards in your hand that they have seen.
Ten tricks empty the stock. The other ten are played out of the cards in your hands, and the hand is over after twenty tricks, when nobody has a card left.
Buongiochi, the bonus points
The 3s, 2s and aces are the honours, and holding them in the right combinations pays bonus points, called buongiochi. Four of one rank scores 4, three of one rank scores 3, and a napoletana, the 3, 2 and ace of one suit, scores 3. You score what your first ten cards make as you play to the first trick. After that you score only when a card you have just drawn completes a combination, and you cannot keep one back to declare later.
A combination can use cards you have already declared. Say you scored three aces for 3 and have played none of them, and the fourth ace comes from the stock. Pagat has you declare four aces for 4. Had you played one of the three before drawing the last ace, you would declare the three you then hold for 3. Our table declares all of this for you, and adds each declaration to your match score at once. Everyone sees what is declared, as on the page Pagat has for four: a napoletana names its suit and three of a rank names the suit that is missing, so a declaration tells the other seat exactly which cards you hold.
The count and the match
After the twentieth trick, each of you adds up the thirds in the tricks you won, and the winner of the last trick adds a whole point, three thirds. Divide by three and drop the fraction. Say you took 24 thirds in tricks and lost the last trick. That is 8 points. Your opponent has the other 8 thirds plus 3 for the last trick, 11 thirds, which is 3 and two thirds, so 3. Between you, 11 points, every hand.
Those points go onto your totals, which already hold your buongiochi. The match ends at a count when somebody has reached the target, and the higher total wins it. Pagat lists the targets as 21, 31, 41 or 51, and at our table the host picks how long. If you are both past it and level, we deal another hand.
What the table does for you
It declares your buongiochi, keeps each seat's running card points on show, dims a card you cannot play and says why in the status line, and does the count with the fractions dropped. There are two seats, so you can send a friend a link, or learn it against the computer first.