What is Smear?
Smear is what a lot of the Midwest calls its favorite partnership card game — and if you grew up playing Pitch, you already know most of it. Players bid on how many points their team will take, the high bidder names trump with the first card they lead, and teams race to a target score.
The difference is in the points. Where 4-point Pitch scores High, Low, Jack, and Game, Smear usually adds at least one more point to the hand, which makes bidding a little bolder and a lot more fun. The game is especially popular in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas, where church basements and family reunions keep it alive.
How many players and cards are used in Smear?
Smear is most often played by four players in two partnerships, partners sitting across from each other. A standard 52-card deck is used, and some tables add one or two Jokers.
Each player is dealt six cards, three at a time. The deal passes to the left after every hand. Some groups play cutthroat Smear with three or five players, each scoring alone, and a few Wisconsin tables play six-handed in three teams of two.
What are the points in Smear: High, Low, Jack, Jick, and Game?
Smear typically scores five points: High, Low, Jack, Jick, and Game. High: the highest trump played in the hand. Low: the lowest trump played (at many tables it goes to whoever played it, at others to whoever captured it). Jack: the jack of trump. Jick: the jack of the same color as trump, which counts as a trump card for the hand. Game: the team with the most card points in its captured tricks, counting tens as 10, aces as 4, kings as 3, queens as 2, and jacks as 1.
Tables that add a Joker usually treat it as a trump worth one more point. Always settle which points are in play before the first deal — house rules vary more in Smear than in almost any other card game.
Where the Joker ranks also varies. Some groups put it just below the Jick, others treat it as the lowest trump but say it cannot win the Low point. A few play with two Jokers, sometimes called the high and low Joker, which can push a single hand to six or seven points.
How does bidding work in Smear?
Starting left of the dealer, each player gets one chance to bid or pass. A bid is the number of points your team promises to take, and each bid must beat the one before it. The highest bid wins; many tables allow a bid of all the points in play, sometimes called a smudge or a shoot.
If everyone passes, most tables make the dealer take the bid at the minimum — the stick-the-dealer rule — so a hand is never thrown in.
The minimum bid is usually 2. A useful way to judge your hand is to count the points you can win yourself. An ace of trump is almost a sure High. Holding both the Jack and the Jick with a high trump to protect them is worth two. A low trump is a decent shot at Low, and you can count on your partner for roughly one more point.
How do you set trump and play tricks?
The winning bidder leads the first card, and its suit becomes trump. Players must follow the suit led if they can, though most Smear tables let you play a trump at any time instead. The highest trump wins the trick, or the highest card of the led suit if no trump was played.
The winner of each trick leads the next one, until all six cards have been played. Remember that the Jick belongs to the trump suit for the hand. If spades are trump and someone leads clubs, the jack of clubs is not a club for that hand; it is a trump, so a player holding it cannot use it to follow clubs.
How does scoring work in Smear?
If the bidding team takes at least as many points as it bid, it scores every point it won. If it falls short, it is set: the bid is subtracted from its score, which can drive a team below zero. The other team always scores the points it captured.
Games are usually played to 11 or 21. If both teams would cross the line on the same hand, the bidding team typically goes out first. Some tables count points in a fixed order instead, High first and Game last, and award the win to whichever team reaches the target first.
A sample Smear hand, scored
Spades are trump, so the jack of clubs is the Jick. North bids 3 and leads the ace of spades, which wins High. Later North's partner, South, captures the jack of clubs when East is forced to play it under South's king of spades. West holds the jack of spades and wins a trick with it. East plays the two of spades on a trick West wins, and North-South counts 26 Game points to East-West's 14.
North-South scores High, Jick, and Game for 3 points, which makes the bid. East-West scores Jack and Low for 2 points. Without the Jick point, as in 4-point Pitch, North-South would have taken only 2 points and been set 3, which shows how the extra Jick point changes what a hand is worth.
How is Smear different from Pitch?
Think of Smear as Pitch with a bigger prize pool. Pitch has four points and thirteen trumps per hand. Smear usually has five or six points and fourteen or more trumps, because the Jick and any Joker join the trump suit. That extra trump makes long trump suits slightly more common and raises the typical winning bid.
The scoring targets are similar, with 11 and 21 both common. The bigger difference is culture: Smear tables tend to have more local rules, from bonus points for a made smear to special rules about who scores Low, so treat every new table as its own rulebook.
Smear strategy and common mistakes
The extra point changes strategy. A Jick in your hand is a hidden trump that can quietly steal a trick, so hands with a jack of each red suit (or each black suit) bid stronger than they look. Protect your Low, lead your high trump early to pull the opponents' trump, and count the ten-cards — Game is often decided by who captures the tens.
The most common mistake is forgetting the Jick when counting trump. Players lead what they think is the last trump, only to watch an opponent drop the off-color jack on it. Another is overbidding a hand with only one strong card, since High alone is just one of five or more points.
If you want to practice the bidding and trump play before your next family game, pitch.ac plays the classic 4-point version free against AI or friends, with no download needed.