Pontoon (card game)

Pontoon is a British banking card game in the comparing family, usually played by three to seven players though it can accommodate as few as two or as many as ten. The earliest recorded rules for its ancestor were published in Britain in 1800, and the name pontoon itself dates to the First World War, arising as a soldier's corruption of the game's earlier French name. Despite a common assumption, pontoon is not simply a variant of blackjack; the two games instead both descend independently from the early British form of vingt-un, with pontoon representing the British domestic branch of twenty-one and blackjack the American branch of the same family. Pontoon has no single official rule set and its rules vary considerably from place to place, but the game proved durably popular, and by 1981 it ranked as the third most popular card game in Britain, trailing only rummy and whist.