Pinochle Scoring and Meld Chart

Pinochle hands are scored in two stages. Before a single trick is played, each partnership shows its meld — scoring combinations held in hand — and banks those points. Then the hand is played out, and the points hidden inside the tricks themselves, called counters, are added on top. The bid ties the two stages together. The side that wins the auction must reach its bid using meld and counters combined. Make it, and everything counts. Fall short, and the side goes set, losing the full value of the bid. The defenders simply keep whatever they earn, with one classic catch: a side must win at least one trick during the hand to keep its meld. One note before the chart: the playable game on this site uses a streamlined one-tenth scale without runs or the dix. The values below are the standard single-deck values you will meet at a physical table.

Melds fall into three classes. Class A covers runs and marriages, Class B covers "arounds" (one card of a rank in every suit), and Class C is the combination the game is named for. Class A — runs and marriages: Run, also called a flush (A-10-K-Q-J of trump): 150 Royal marriage (K-Q of trump): 40 Marriage (K-Q of a side suit): 20 Dix, also called the deece (9 of trump): 10 Class B — arounds: Aces around (one ace in every suit): 100 Kings around: 80 Queens around: 60 Jacks around: 40 Class C — pinochle: Pinochle (jack of diamonds + queen of spades): 40 Double pinochle (both jacks of diamonds + both queens of spades): 300 A card may work in melds of different classes at the same time — the queen of spades can belong to a marriage, queens around, and a pinochle all at once. It cannot be reused within its own class, though, which is why a run does not also score its royal marriage separately.

During play, three ranks carry points: every ace, ten, and king captured in a trick is worth one point. With two copies of each in all four suits, the deck holds 24 counters, and winning the last trick adds one more — 25 points available in every hand. Queens, jacks, and nines capture nothing by themselves; their job is winning the tricks that contain the counters. That flat count is the common modern convention, and it is the one to learn first. Older rulebooks grade the same cards instead — eleven for an ace, ten for a ten, four for a king, three for a queen, two for a jack — and some tables simplify to ace and ten worth ten with king and queen worth five. Every one of those systems puts 250 points into play per hand including the last-trick bonus, so they are the same game at a different scale. Agree on one before the deal and nothing else changes.

The auction sets the stakes. Most single-deck partnership tables open the bidding at 100 or 150 points and raise in steps of ten. The high bidder names trump, and the partnership takes on the contract. Going set is the sharpest edge in pinochle scoring. If the bidding side's meld plus counters fall short of the bid, the hand scores them nothing, and the full amount of the bid is subtracted from their running total — a 250 bid that fails costs 250, not just the difference. The defenders still score their own meld and counters as usual. That penalty is why experienced players bid what a hand can deliver rather than what it might. A modest made contract beats an ambitious set every time, and the chart above is the tool for the math: count your meld, estimate your counters from aces and trump length, then bid.

Double-deck pinochle keeps the same scoring skeleton and changes the numbers. The deck grows to 80 cards — four copies of the ace, ten, king, queen, and jack in every suit — and the nines disappear entirely, which removes the dix from the meld list. With four copies of every card, the big melds get bigger. Arounds come in double, triple, and even quadruple versions, and double pinochle stops being a rarity. Most double-deck tables also quote values on a compressed scale, with a run worth 15 rather than 150 and aces around worth 10, and roughly 50 trick points per hand, so bids and totals look different even though the logic is identical. If your family plays the four-player, eighty-card version, the double deck Pinochle guide below covers the deal, bidding, and play differences in full.