| Origin | England |
|---|---|
| Alternative name(s) | Post |
| Players | 2-6 |
| Skill(s) required | Bluffing & Vying |
| Cards | 52 |
| Deck | English |
| Play | Clockwise |
| Playing time | 10 min. |
| Random chance | Medium |
| Related games | |
| Primero, Poker | |
Post and Pair, is a 16th century English gambling card game based on the same three-card combinations, namely Prial, found in related game of this family. It is much depended on vying, or betting, requiring repeated staking as well as daring on the part of the players. It is considered a derivative on the game of Primero and closely resembles Put[1], having been as popular as Gleek and Noddy during the Tudor Dynasty.
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It is generally agreed by every expert and researcher in the field of playing cards that the game of Post and Pair clearly derives from the game of Primero. Due to its gaming mechanics and resemblance with Primero and its variants, it is easily implied that Post and Pair evolved into a faster-paced card game with the addition of rules borrowed from neighboring games, like the Tudor game of "Post", attested by the Oxford English Dictionary from the early 16th to the 17th centuries, which may have survived longer in local versions[2].
Charles Cotton in his 1674 The Complete Gamester, mentions that Post ad Pair was particularly popular in the west of England, as well as All-Fours was popular in Kent and Fives in Ireland. And if Francis Willughby gives no rules for the game, Holme and Cotton describe it as a three-stake game almost identical to a variation of Brag called Three-card brag, or Three-stake Brag[3].
Three separate stakes are made by each player. After staking at “Post” and then at “Pair”, and getting two cards, the players stake at “Seat”. A third card is dealt upwards and the best of the cards so dealt entitles the holder to the first stake. The order of priority being as above mentioned.
The second stake becomes the property of the player with the best hand. A Pair-royal of Aces is the best hand, and next, a Pair-royal of any three cards according to their value: three Kings, three Queens, three Knaves, etc. If no one has a Pair-royal, the highest pair wins, and next to this, the hand that holds the highest cards[1].
The third stake goes to the player with the best pair or cards totaling, or most approaching [4], twenty-one points, that is, two Tens and an Ace, and court cards counting as ten. Any player whose cards fall short of that number is entitled (in due turn) to receive a card or cards from the stock, in the hope of amending his points, but if he overdraws he is out of the game.
The eldest hand may pass and come in again, if any of the gamesters vye it. If not, the dealer may plead it out, or double it.[5].
As Charles Cotton said in The Complete Gamester: "The vye is what you please to adventure upon the goodness of your own hand; or if it be bad, and you imagine your adversary's is so likewise, then bid him high courageously, by which means you daunt your antagonist, and so bring him to submission. If all the gamesters keep in till all have done, and by consent shew their cards, the best cards carry the game. Now according to agreement those that keep in till last, may divide the stakes, or shew the best card for it. Observe, where the cards fall in several hands of the same sort, as a pair of pair-royal, and so forth, the eldest hand carries it."
Post and Pair was first mentioned in a list of games played by Gargantua of Gargantua and Pantagruel, a novel written by François Rabelais in the 16th century.
Shakespeare mentions the name of the game as well in a dialogue between the character Rosaline and the Princess of France in a conversation about Berowne, one of the lords attending the King Ferdinand of Navarre, in one of his lost plays Love's Labour's Lost, written in the mid-1590s.[6]
In Ben Jonson's Masque of Christmas, the card game of Post and pair is introduced as one of his children[7], thus characterizing him as a Knave. According to the A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, obsolete phrases and ancient customs of the Fourteenth century, by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, written in 1868, Pur is the name given to the Knave or Jack in the game of Post and Pair. It seems to be formed by an abbreviation of pair-royal corrupted into "purrial", hence pair-royal has since been further corrupted into prial[8].
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.