Sport: Parlor Pinochle

One night last week, at Manhattan's Cavendish Club, the impossible happened: no one was playing bridge. The exclusive headquarters for contract bridge experts had gone all out for a brand new four-handed card game called Check Pinochle.

Check should appeal to the public even more than to the experts. It is less exacting, more exciting than bridge, and better fun because of its big percentage of luck. Combining features of two popular games, Check offers appealing innovations to fans of both. In less sacred precincts than the Cavendish Club it may challenge in earnest bridge's social supremacy.

Fistfuls from Firehouse. Because Check is played with a 48-card pinochle deck (i.e., two ordinary 52-card decks with all cards below the nine discarded), every deal is bound to provide a fistful of aces, kings and queens. Bridge players, accustomed to holding a number of "bust" hands during an evening of play, will perk up at such a splash of face cards. Then, too, whereas bridge games often drag out as hands are passed because they are too evenly distributed, almost every Check deal gives either side a chance to bid and make a contract (see col. 2).

The new game stems from several old and all but forgotten fourhanded, partnership pinochle games (one was called Firehouse Pinochle). In its present form, Check has been played in Manhattan for about a year, quietly at first and mainly by pinochle addicts. Now that bridge experts have taken to the game, the Association of American Playing Card Manufacturers has given it official recognition, and rules of play— with a system of scoring— have reached some degree of permanency.

Dummies and Wives. Two Cavendish members— George Rapee, 29-year-old U.S. individual world contract bridge champion, and Howard Schencken, longtime a Life Master, famed as the bridge experts' expert— are at work on a Check guidebook.

Rapee thinks that the game will stampede dyed-in-the-wool pinochle players, but that the skill required in bridge will keep it the favorite game of the experts. In family parlors, he admits, Check may take the cake.

Says Bridge Champion Rapee: "Check is a welcome relief . . . from racking your brain over a mathematical bridge hand. . . ... Your interest is always kept up by the fast play . . . and you're never a dummy." Mrs. Helen Sobel, chic, cool No. 1 woman bridge expert, tried her hand at the game, gave an unexpected reason for its probable popularity: "A husband won't be able to tell his wife he's going out to play pinochle with the boys. . . . From now on, every wife can be part of the game."