This is Irish Loo with some additional variations. Each red counter should be worth five white ones, and the players will require about fifty red counters each at starting. The dealer puts up five red counters. Any player holding a flush of five cards in any suit may immediately claim the pool, and every person at the table, whether playing or not, is supposed to be looed, and pays five red counters to the next pool. If two players hold flushes, the elder hand wins, even if the younger hand holds a flush in trumps.
Another variation is to make the club Jack, which is known as Pam, always the best trump. Combined with four cards of any suit, this card will make a flush. If any player leads the trump ace, the holder of Pam must pass the trick if he can do so without revoking. The old usage was for the holder of the trump ace to notify any player holding Pam to pass, if he wished him to do so; but that is quite superfluous, as no player wants to lose his ace of trumps, and it goes without saying that he wants Pam to pass it.
Interesting articles on Loo will be found in “Bell’s Life,” the “Field,” the “Sportsman,” and the “Westminster Papers;” Vol. II. of the latter especially.
ALL FOURS FAMILY.
All Fours is to be found amongst the oldest games of cards, and is the parent of a large family of variations, all of which are of American birth. The youngest member of the family, Cinch, seems to have a bright future before it, and bids fair to become one of our most popular games. The chief defect in Cinch has been the method of scoring, which left too much to luck. In the following pages the author has attempted to remedy this.
The name, “All Fours,” seems to have been varied at times to “All Four,” and was derived from four of the five points which counted towards game; the fifth point, for “gift” having been apparently quite overlooked. The game was originally ten points up, and the cards were dealt one at a time. According to the descriptions in some of the older Hoyles, the honours and Tens of the plain suits did not count towards game; but this is evidently an error, for we find in the same editions the advice to trump or win the adversary’s best cards in plain suits. This would obviously be a mere waste of trumps if these plain-suit cards did not count for anything.
All Fours seems to have been popular with all classes of society at one time or another. Cotton’s “Compleat Gamester” gives it among the principal games in his day, 1674. Daines Barrington, writing a hundred years later, speaks of All Fours in connection with Whist. “Whist,” he says, “seems never to have been played on principles until about fifty years ago; before that time [1735] it was confined chiefly to the servants’ hall, with All Fours and Put.” Another writer tells us that Ombre was the favourite game of the ladies, and Piquet of the gentlemen par excellence; clergymen and country squires preferring Whist, “while the lower orders shuffled away at All Fours, Put, Cribbage, and Lanterloo.” In 1754 a pamphlet was published containing: “Serious Reflections on the dangerous tendency of the common practice of Card-playing; especially the game of All Four.” For many years All Fours was looked upon as the American gambler’s game par excellence, and it is still the great standby of our coloured brother; who would sooner swallow a Jack than have it caught.