Thursday, July 23, 2015

As Luck Would Have It

by Pa Rock
Lucky Duck

I play pinochle at the local senior center every Wednesday night.  It's a card game that I enjoy, and I look forward to the weekly get-togethers.  I have been attending for about a year now and have made several new friends over the course of that time.  Each week we manage to fill three or four tables with four players each.  We draw for partners and rotate after each game with the losers moving to a different table.  Some weeks I play very well - other weeks I don't.

My partner last night, a sweet lady named Pearl, was probably growing a bit tired of me after I overbid a couple of hands causing us to lose unnecessarily - but I redeemed my self with the last hand of the night.

We play with double decks of pinochle cards minus the nines.  That leaves four aces, four kings, four queens, four jacks, and four tens - in each suit - or eighty cards in the deck with twenty being dealt to each player.  A "run" is when a person has an ace, king, queen, jack, and ten of a suit and it is worth 15 points if that person succeeds in getting the bid.   Most people usually have at least a run before they enter into the bidding at the beginning of each hand.

A "double run" is where a person has two of everything contained in a run.  Double runs are worth 150 points and are exceedingly rare.  Our group has only had a few of those in the past year - and I have only had two in my entire life - one about a month ago, and the other in the final hand last night.    It caused Pearl and me to end the evening on a big win!

Then, as luck would have it, I came home and checked my Missouri Lotto tickets and found that I had successfully matched four of six numbers - a win that should pay out in the twenty dollar range.  (Two more correct numbers and I would have pocketed $5.2 million, but close, as they say, only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades!

So that was my lucky streak.  I suspect that it has run its course, but today I will buy another Lotto ticket just to be sure!

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