Game Strategy

Gin Players

At the very outset, I make this promise: No matter how good a Gin player you are, this section will improve your game. It is a collection of tips and hints that I've gathered over the years from the country's crack players. This advice will center on Gin Rummy Online, but most of it can be put to profitable use in any game of the Rummy family. Let me say this right now: these games are not played for fun only.
They are played for money. Card games that lack the gambling element, the profit motive, don't attain mass popularity. You may not construe it as gambling when you play for small beers, and your wife or mother might be horrified if it were suggested that when she plays for the patchwork quilt at the Tuesday Afternoon she's gambling. But the gambling and gambling incentive are there.
Why do some players win more games than other players do? Why do some players lose constantly to certain opponents, yet win constantly from others? Why are some normally intelligent persons very bad Rummy players? Is it true that good players don't play the same kind of game? That each one has a little special knowledge-his own system-of the tales of the cards?

Observation

Watching thousands of Rummy players and tens of thousands of Gin games in the last 20 years, I've made it my business to observe the small mannerisms of winning and losing competitors, to cross-examine hundreds of experts, to measure the difference imposed on the play by the stakes of the game; I have observed not only that sober citizens do indeed bet $10,000 on a single game, but how they bet it.
Card sense is knowing what to do and when. At Gin Rummy, should you go down now or on the next pick? Should you take your chance and go for Gin or wait and see if you can't under knock your opponent when he goes down? Should you break up this pair and try for that sequence? Should you throwaway this card, or will it help your opponent? To be a good card player, to have good card sense, you must have good reasons for making any of these decisions-and reasoning is the application of intelligence. Not many players carry it to this extent, but even the beginner practices to a degree what I've been preaching. When he holds a pair of tens and knows that there are two more tens in his opponent's hand or in the stock, he says that his two tens are alive-and he is applying mathematics, whether he realizes it or not.

Card Probability

The background of Gin Rummy player must be able to visualize and memorize all the possible melds in a hand the instant he picks it up. He must be able to calculate at sight the probabilities for his two of a kind, his two-card sequences; and he must not overlook any melds he may hold. There is a way-a method devised by a famous Gin Rummy player who has won thousands at the game-of cultivating this knack of forming mental pictures and avoiding fatal plays in the early stages of the game.
It is a way of picking up cards which have just been dealt. This splendid, ice-cold gambler never picks up his ten cards all at one time. It is impossible, he says, to impress them on the mind when they confront the eye in all their natural confusion. So he picks them up one at a time, sorting them as he goes, impressing them on his mind and marshaling them for his first play. Moving thus deliberately, he can appraise the odds on every possible combination of his cards; and, at the very least, he has them in orderly array when the time comes for him to make his first draw. This is his secret. More players make their bad play at the start of the hand than at any other time. Never forget it-pick up your hand slowly and arrange it carefully. Think-first about your own resources and strategy, then about your opponent's.