Post and pair

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 named post, attested by The Oxford English Dictionary from the early 16th to the 17th centuries, which may have survived longer in local versions.[3]

Charles Cotton, in his 1674 The Compleat Gamester, mentions that Post and Pair was particularly popular in the west of England, as much as All Fours was popular in Kent, and Fives in Ireland.[4] And if Francis Willughby's 1816 Book of Games gives no rules for the game,[3] Cotton describes it as a three-stake game - stakes being laid for Post, Pair and Seat[4] - almost identical to Three-Card Brag (or Three-Stake Brag).[5]

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 face up 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 court (face) cards according to their value: three kings, three queens, three knaves (jacks), etc. If no one has a pair-royal, the highest pair wins, and next to this, the hand that holds the highest cards.[2]

The third stake goes to the player with the best pair or cards totaling, or most approaching,[6] twenty-one points, that is, two tens and an ace, with 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 the point value of the hand, but if overdrawn, to beyond 21, is out of the game. In this respect, it is closely related to blackjack.

The eldest hand may pass and come in again, if any of the gamesters vye with a bet. If not, the dealer may plead it out, or double it.[7]

• A pair-royal of aces.
• A pair-royal of any three cards according to their value: three kings, three queens, etc.
• A pair of aces, then a pair of kings, followed by a pair of queens and so on in ascending order.
• The highest cards in one hand.
• A pair of cards totalling, or approaching 21 points.
• Court (face) cards value 10 points each, and pip cards their face value.

As Charles Cotton said in The Compleat Gamester (1674):[8]

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 1532 novel by François Rabelais.[9]

Shakespeare mentions the vye ("taunt") of the game, named as "pair", in a dialogue between the character Rosaline and the Princess of France in a conversation about the courtier Berowne, in his early play Love's Labour's Lost, written in the mid-1590s.[10]

They are worse fools to purchase mocking so.
That same Berowne I'll torture ere I go.
...
So pair-taunt-like would I o'ersway his state,
That he should be my fool, and I his fate.

In Ben Jonson's Masque of Christmas, the card game of post and pair is introduced as one of his children,[11] 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 was the term 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, similar to how pair-royal has since been otherwise corrupted into prial.[12]

The game is mentioned in Canto Six of Walter Scott's epic poem Marmion as a "vulgar" game played at Christmas.[13] Post and pair is also prominently mentioned in A Woman Killed with Kindness by Thomas Heywood.

• Gilet (card game)
• Primo visto
• Poker

• Miers, David. Regulating Commercial Gambling: Past, Present, and Future. Oxford University Press. "Gaming in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries". doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199276158.003.0002. ISBN 9780199276158.

Attribution

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Post and Pair". Encyclopædia Britannica. 22 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 196.

• Cotton, Charles (1674). The Compleat Gamester. London: A.M. Often republished with Lucas, Theophilus (1714). Lives of the Gamesters – e.g. in Games and Gamesters of the Restoration. Ramage Press. 2000. ISBN 978-1446501764.)
• Nares, Robert (1822). A Glossary: Or Collection of Words, Phrases, Names &c., London: Robert Triphook.
• Rabelais, François (1532). Gargantua and Pantagruel.
• Shakespeare, William "Love's Labour's Lost"; ed. H. R. Woudhuysen; London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000 [1998]; p. 240.

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Marmion/Notes.

• "Introduction to Period Card Games", Dafydd ap Gwystl; self-published, 6 August 2002
• "A History of Poker", David Parlett and John McLeod, 2010 [2005]; Pagat.com: Card Game Rules
• Gaming in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries