A proper home for a hundred-year-old card game.

Why we built Pitch Online

Pitch has been dealt at American kitchen tables for more than a century. It goes by different names depending on where you grew up: Setback across New England, High-Low-Jack in many older households, Pitch through the Midwest, and Smear in parts of the upper Midwest where an extra point or two is added. It deals fast, scores in four points, and rewards nerve as much as memory.

Finding a good table online was surprisingly hard. The options we found had clunky interfaces, pay-to-win gimmicks, or rules that did not match the game people actually learned from their parents and grandparents. We built pitch.ac to fix that: the real game, dealt properly, free to play in a browser or on a phone, with friends or strangers, any time of day.

The game we play

Games on pitch.ac follow classic 4-point Pitch. Every player is dealt six cards, players bid 2, 3, or 4 on how many points their team will win, and the high bidder sets trump by leading the first card. Teams compete for High, Low, Jack, and Game, and a team that misses its bid is set back by the amount it bid. Standard games run to 11 points, with a quick game to 7 and a long game to 21 available.

Because every family plays a little differently, the host of a table can choose the house rules before the game starts: whether the dealer may steal the bid by matching it, whether players must strictly follow suit or may trump in, and whether Low goes to the team that captures it or the player who plays it. Stick-the-dealer is always on, so every hand is contested. The full rules are on our rules page, and our guides cover regional variants in depth.

Fair play, by design

Fairness matters more in a card game than almost anywhere else, so we keep it simple. The shuffle is random, the deal is never tilted toward anyone, and paying for a membership never changes the cards you receive. AI opponents play by exactly the same rules as people and see only their own hand.

There are no energy timers and no locked features that change the card game itself. You do not need an account to play: enter a name and you are dealt in as a guest. A free account is optional and keeps your stats, gems, and unlocked looks across devices.

How Pitch Online stays free

Pitch Online is free. It is supported by an optional Pitch Club membership, which includes cosmetic card backs and tables, ad-free play, and reserved seats in the twice-weekly Showdown tournaments, and by a single ad panel shown after games to players who are not members.

Players earn gems by winning games and keeping a daily win streak, and gems unlock cosmetics such as card backs, felt tables, and victory effects. None of these change how the cards are dealt or scored.

Who plays Pitch Online

Our players are mostly people who grew up with the game: families who want to keep a weekly game going across different cities, friends who used to play at the cabin or the club, and longtime players who just want a quick hand against good AI at lunch. We also see a steady stream of newcomers learning from our rules page and guides.

The same table works on every device. A grandparent on an iPad, a parent on a laptop, and a teenager on an iPhone can all sit at one private table using a 4-letter code, with AI players filling any empty seats.

Who we are

We are a small independent team, and the people who read support messages are the people who build the game. Rule disputes, bug reports, and feature ideas all land in the same inbox. If you learned Pitch from a grandparent and something here does not match how your family plays, we want to hear about it.