Belote rules

The turn-up

• •Four players, two teams, 32 cards
• •One card is turned face up — that suit is the trump on offer
• •Players decide in turn whether to take it; taking it means committing to score more than the other team
• •If nobody takes it in the first round, the choice widens in the second

Card values

Standard Belote values: in trump the jack leads at 20 and the nine follows at 14.

152 card points plus 10 for the last trick — 162 in a deal.

Belote and rebelote

The king and queen of trump in the same hand are worth 20, announced as you play the second of them. Here they are always credited to the player who holds them — even when the contract is lost.

Plain Belote vs Belote with melds

The two variants share one engine and differ in exactly one thing: whether declarations beyond belote count.

• •Belote — only belote and rebelote score; runs and four-of-a-kinds are off
• •Belote with melds — runs (20 / 50 / 100) and four-of-a-kinds score, for the team holding the biggest one
• •Both play to 501 in raw points
• •Both use the French four-of-a-kind values: jack 200, nine 150, everything else 100

Melds, when they are on

Four of a kind: jack 200, nine 150, ace / ten / king / queen 100 each.

The 81–81 split

A deal can end 81–81. Rather than award it arbitrarily, those points are carried forward and go to whoever wins the next deal that is not itself a tie — so a dead-even deal still decides something.

Scoring and the target

Raw points, no division, first team to 501. A deal is worth 162 plus declarations, so a match is typically four to six deals.