Put (card game)

Put is an English trick-taking and vying card game first recorded in the sixteenth century, played chiefly as a two-hand contest though variants extend it to three or four players. It uses a standard fifty-two card deck with an unusual rank order that runs from the three down through the two, ace, king, queen and jack to the four. Each player is dealt three cards, and the non-dealer leads the first trick; there is no requirement to follow suit or observe a trump, so any card may be played. Winning two of three tricks in a hand scores a point, and a player may declare Put before play to raise the stakes and challenge an opponent to concede or continue for a higher reward. Put appeared in English literature by 1662 and its rules were set down formally in the 1670s by Charles Cotton and Francis Willughby. Early accounts describe it as a favored gambling game of taverns and inns, notorious for the cheating that accompanied it, and it later influenced the development of the card game Brag before falling out of common play during the nineteenth century.