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The value of the meld in pinochle, and we're going to go into the specialty combinations.
We have a term called a round house. Now that has nothing to do with boxing or anything
but, again, for the sake of illustration, let's just look at this hand. I'll take cards
out and so forth. We've already determined that we have fifteen point run in spades.
We've determined that we have, you know, separate marriages. In the spade marriage, we do not
count, because that's contained in the run. But if we had an additional marriage in spades
we would get four points for that. Remember four points for a trump marriage. Let's say
the opponent was naming diamonds for trump, we would count four points toward our meld
count. That's not four points on the score sheet. Its four points towards our meld count.
That meld count is so important. Now, if you look at this hand closely, look what we have
here. There's a certain amount of symmetry to this, okay. You see that? We have four
kings and four queens. Okay. Now if we just had three kings, we didn't have that, well
we didn't have the queen of spades. We have to have the queen of spades from that. Say,
for the sake of argument, or the sake of comparison, say we only had one, two, three, four different
kings, they have to be different ones and only three queens, we wouldn't be able to
claim the round house because that's a marriage in every suit. But we could claim a thing
called a rounds. For example, we said aces all around gives you ten meld points. Kings
all around gives you eight meld points. Queens all around gives you six meld points. And
jacks all around give you four meld points. Those are very important. Now we're going
to get into this melding stuff later when we get into the intermediate and advanced
play. However, if we're gifted enough to have all four marriages, we get twenty-four points.
That's called the round house. That's a really great hand. So always look for that. Because
that's a big shot of meld and you'll see just how important that is as the game plays out.