Apart from Bridge, Poker and Cribbage, there are several other card games which are still popular in the USA nowadays. Three of these - Spades, Hearts and Euchre - are going to be MSO 2000 events. You can find out more about them from Joe Andrews's excellent coverage on this site. Spades and Hearts have boomed in popularity through play on the Internet. In the case of Euchre, there are also local clubs and leagues. One example is the Washington DC Euchre League where players obviously don't take themselves too seriously as the teams have names like Something in my Pants and Dumber than Dirt! The Euchre Club of Chicago publishes a newsletter called What's Trump? which you can read on their Web site. As well as information about the club, it has some light-hearted articles - one relates to the children's TV series Teletubbies!

The popular two-player rummy game Gin Rummy was featured in the first MSO. This game, which uses the standard 52-card pack, is said to have been invented in 1909 in New York by E. T. Baker. It became very popular in the 1940s and was said to played by film stars in Hollywood.

Pinochle is a trick-taking game with bidding, usually played by four players in partnerships. Players score points for melding combinations of cards, and for taking certain cards in tricks. There are bidding systems which, as in Bridge, are used to convey information to the partner. The deck of cards used can be a single Pinochle deck of 48 cards - made by taking the A, K, Q, J, 10 and 9 of each suit from two standard packs of cards. Or it can be an 80-card double Pinochle deck, made by combining two of the single decks and dropping the 9s.

Bid Whist is, as the name suggests, a variety of Whist with bidding! It is a game for four players playing in partnerships, and it uses a standard deck of cards with two distinguishable jokers - a big joker and a little joker - added.

This National Card Sharks site has information about Pinochle and Bid Whist in the USA, with details of tournaments and clubs. There is a National Pinochle Association, with affiliated clubs in 20 states, the greatest concentration of them being in Georgia and Florida. A National Pinochle Title was contested in Augusta, Georgia in September 1998 and the winners were Miriam Lucia and Lester McCray.

This Rook site is about the game of Rook, played with a special pack of 57 cards. The cards, introduced by Parker Brothers in 1906, have four suits of 14 cards each, plus the Rook which is a joker card with a picture of the bird on it. Rook is said to have been very popular with Mennonites, whose religion did not allow them to play games with conventional cards.

The American version of Schafkopf, the game which developed into Skat, is called Sheepshead. It is played with the 32-card pack, usually as a five-player game. It is very popular in the area around Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Here is the Sheepshead Association home page, where you can find information about rules, books & tournaments, and you can order an official Sheepshead T-shirt! And this Sheepshead site has a large international database of players.