Culbertson on Canasta

By Ely Culbertson

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Sep 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473356320

Book preview

CULBERTSON ON CANASTA

By ELY CULBERTSON

A COMPLETE GUIDE FOR BEGINNERS AND ADVANCED PLAYERS WITH THE OFFICIAL LAWS OF CANASTA

CONTENTS

Part I—What the Game Is About

Canasta Step by Step

You Play a Hand of Canasta

Part II—Principles and Practice of Good Play

Hunting for Big and Smaller Game

Taking the Pile for the First Meld

The Subtle Art of Discarding

Advertising

Tactics When You Need 90

When You Need 120

How to Remember in Canasta

Tactics When the Pack Is Self-Frozen

Play After the First Meld

Discarding

Freezing the Pack

The Round Following Opponents’ First Meld

Techniques in Playing for Out

Defense Against Opponents Who Have Many Cards

Offensive Strategy After Capturing a Large Pack

Tactics in Unusual Situations

Psychology in Canasta

The Law of Symmetry in Canasta

Advanced Tactics

A Calculated Risk

Part III—Two-Handed Canasta and Other Variants

OFFICIAL LAWS OF CANASTA

What I Think of Canasta

IN LIEU OF AN INTRODUCTION

Canasta is a bizarre, exciting and charmingly exasperating game. I like it. It is simple-enough for a child, deep enough for an expert. It can be learned in thirty minutes, but forgotten never. It is as modern as an atomic bomb; and yet it is as old as the first embryonic melding games of three centuries ago. It is a true partnership game, like contract bridge, and it has bluff, as in poker. It looks like Persian rummy, has the flavor of pinochle, and barks wildly like Oklahoma. It cribs from cribbage. And withal, it has an inner world and logic of its own, taxing the capacity of a scientific mind. It has methods all its own. The only thing it needs is a Culbertson Method to be added to its madness. If the game can be stabilized, if the chaotic flood of variations, contradictory laws, multiple revisions, can be channeled, we will have a great game for the enjoyment of millions.

Will Canasta supplant contract bridge? No game can supplant the Monarch of Card Games. According to a national survey of the Association of Card Manufacturers, last year there were, in America alone, thirty-five million bridge players (modesty compels me to admit that not all thirty-five million play Culbertson—only 98%), eight million pinochle players, and six hundred thousand gin rummy players. Today there are four million Canasta players, and I hope millions more will take it up.

Canasta is not a rival to contract bridge. It draws its support from three basic groups: first, the players who always preferred pinochle or rummy games to contract bridge, and who now are moving into the Canasta camp; second, those who never played cards before and who find Canasta easy to learn; finally, the bridge players themselves, many of whom welcome a lighter second game, if only for variety. Canasta is ideal for a couple, a tired business man, or a hostess entertaining mixed company, some of whom do not play bridge. Four-handed Canasta—the basic form of the game, and which is the prime subject of this book—is so exciting, in a way that is different from the excitement of bridge, that I myself welcome it.

Today, Canasta is running strong. Will it go the way of all fads? It looks to me as if it will live lustily for at least a few years. This, and the good features of the game itself, are the reasons I decided some time ago to take up Canasta in earnest. I was not interested in writing a mere quickie on Canasta. The confidence of card players throughout the world is my bread and butter. I wanted a good book or nothing.

From the very start, Canasta writers and enthusiasts urged me to join the Canasta movement. Your authority, your science of card games, publicity outlets and organization of three thousand bridge teachers would give the needed push to make Canasta permanent, Jesse C. Beesley, himself the widely known author of Canasta Up-to-Date, who helped launch Canasta with his articles in Vogue, said to me.

No one knows whether Canasta will become a really permanent game or not, but there is a definite place for a good second game.

In this book I have attempted to do for Canasta players what I did for contract bridge players in my Contract Bridge Complete, and that is to present in the simplest language the latest sound and complete information on Canasta for all players. CULBERTSON ON CANASTA, therefore, is not the hasty output of a single mind. It represents the best that I could gather, test and adopt from the best Canasta players and writers. In that sense this book, like all my bridge books, is far more the product of collective wisdom than of my individual thinking.

THE OFFICIAL LAWS.

The Regency Club and the National Canasta Laws Commission of America, promulgators of the Official Laws governing Canasta, have authorized the publication in this volume of the Official Laws of Canasta for 1950, effective immediately. This step has been taken on their part as an effort to stabilize the rules governing the game. The Laws themselves are printed at the end of this book, beginning on Page 77.

Both the Regency Club and the National Canasta Laws Commission have been cognizant of the confusion brought about by the misinterpretation of the rules governing the game and therefore believe that the authorized publication of the standard code that they have adopted jointly will bring order out of chaos.

The Laws have been adopted with the understanding that they remain unchanged, at least until the end of 1950.

This author, together with all leading authors and experts in the United States, heartily subscribes to these conditions.

PART I

What the Game Is About

Why a Basket?

Everyone knows that Canasta is a beautiful Spanish word meaning basket. But what does a basket have to do with a card game? The game gets its name from the most exciting meld in the history of melding games—a meld of seven of a kind, endowed with a whooping bonus, and called a canasta. But seven aces or seven fours is still a far cry from a woven basket. After exploration by inter-American cable in the Canasta haunts of Uruguay and Argentina, the significance of the basket appeared to me in its true light. The Spanish word for weaving is tejiendo. Tejiendo las cartas, that is, weaving the cards, is a colorful Spanish way of saying that a meld of three of a kind, or more, is being woven together. And when the biggest meld of all, the canasta, is completed, you naturally have woven a basket. The colorful imagination of Latins gave the name and many of its features to the game of Canasta. When the game blended with the Anglo-Saxon spirit of logic and order, it swept the world. Now, let us see how you weave these baskets.

My First Advice . . .

The next 21 pages (Part I) are given to a special presentation of the game for beginners, so designed that even those who never played before could start playing at once, without getting lost in the jungle of complicated rules. It gives a step-by-step description of the game, scoring, and examples. The presentation will be of value even to average players who will benefit by reading it as a refresher course. If you already know the mechanics of the game, you may skip this part, and start with Part II, on page 23, entitled Principles and Practice of Good Play. Part II (the core of the book), is progressively for average, advanced, and very advanced players. Part III deals with Two-Handed, and other variants of Canasta and also includes the Official Laws.

CANASTA STEP BY STEP

The Deck

Canasta is played with two ordinary 52-card decks with four jokers added—a total of 108 cards. No special Canasta deck is needed. In the United States, each deck of playing cards usually contains a joker and an extra card that can serve as a second joker. The two decks don’t have to be the same color, but they do have to be the same size. Any two bridge decks will do.

Wild Cards

The four jokers and the eight deuces are wild cards, and can be used as cards of any denomination. The eight 3-spots are special cards, their function to be explained later. All the other cards are referred to as natural cards.

Value of the Cards

The Canasta deck of 108 cards is the ultimate in simplification. Individual cards have no relative rank outside of their value, and they take no tricks. A king does not outrank an 8-spot, and both have the same point value. Suits and sequences are ignored completely. Cards from the king down to the 8-spot are commonly referred to as high-cards, or 10-point cards; those from the 7 down to the 4 as low-cards, or 5-point cards.

The Meld

The whole game of Canasta pivots around the combinations of three of a kind or more which players, singly or in partnership, seek

Reviews for Culbertson on Canasta

[trurl_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The book contains the rules of Canasta in a human-readable format, the "official" Regency Club rules of Canasta in Legalese and an excellent strategy guide for Canasta. If you want to learn how to play (classic) Canasta well, this is the book.