What's the Score? Trivia Quiz

Answer: 100

The coveted red 3 awards the player or team that melds it 100 points. If one player or team manages to make melds with all four red 3s in the deck, points are doubled and a staggering 800 total points are awarded. Each joker melded awards 50 points, 2s and aces award 20 points, and the remaining cards only grant 5 (black 3-7) or 10 (8-K) points.

Answer: True

Tens and all twelve face cards are worth ten points in blackjack. A blackjack is achieved when one of these 16 cards worth ten points is paired with an ace as the two cards initially dealt.

Answer: 13

While each of the 13 hearts in the deck is worth one point, the queen of spades is worth 13 points and alone matches the value of all hearts in the deck. It is thus most crucial to avoid taking the queen of spades at all cost, including sacrificially taking heaps of hearts, unless one is shooting the moon.

Answer: 26

26 points, reflecting the value of all 13 hearts plus the queen of spades, is given to all three players that didn't take any tricks that had any point cards. As opposed to the game of Spades, where tricks are typically desirable in advancing a team's score, Black Lady/Hearts is referred to as a 'trick-avoidance game', since having the lowest score by avoiding taking tricks is necessary to achieve victory (except in this case of shooting the moon and taking every trick).

Answer: False

Rook is a trick-taking card game like Hearts, Spades, and Bridge. Though the Rook Bird card is the highest-scoring card in the game, it is worth only 20 points, not 100. The other cards that have point values in Rook, cards known as 'counters', are 5s (worth 5 points), 10s (worth 10 points), and 14s (also worth 10 points).

Answer: 100

Bidding nil and managing not to take any tricks in a hand awards a team 100 points. It is quite a boost to be able to capture 100 points when you might otherwise be stuck with 10 or 20 points from a bid of 1 or 2. If a bid of 'nil' is set, and the bidder took at least one trick after bidding nil, the team that failed to make the bid loses 100 points.

As with all things that make the competition in Spades so thrilling: the greater the risk, the greater the potential reward and the greater the potential fall.

Answer: 100

When a team manages the ignominious accomplishment of amassing ten sandbags, a whopping 100 points are lost. Spades can become quite the strategic game of balancing acquiring just enough sandbags to keep one's team ahead without stumbling to disaster. Particularly if scores are close at the end, the game could come down to one or two points that are the result of managing to take just the right amount of bags.

Answer: 25

According to the scoring rules of Phase 10, points are counted for each card remaining in a player's hand after the first player finishes his or her phase and is able to play all their remaining cards to end the round. Wild cards grant the most penalty points at 25.

A Skip card, the next highest-point card, is worth 15 points. Points only factor into determining victory in Phase 10 when multiple players complete the final phase simultaneously, at which point the lowest total score breaks the tie to crown the victor.

Answer: 12

There are six sets of pairs in a four of a kind, and two points are awarded for each of these six pairs, so 12 total points are awarded if a player manages to have all four cards of the same rank in the standard card deck. A three of a kind, three sets of pairs, awards six points. Nearly ten percent of the 121 total points needed are achieved with one four of a kind.

Answer: 9

Baccarat is commonly played in casinos. In this game, all cards 2 through 9 are worth their face value. Aces are worth one point, and the remaining cards are all worth zero points.