Post and pair


Post and pair is a gambling card game that was popular in England in the 16th and 17th centuries — another name of the game was Pink. It is based on the same three-card combinations, namely prial, found in related game of this family.
It is much depended on vying, or betting, requiring repeated staking as well as daring on the part of the players. It is considered a derivative on the game of primero and closely resembles another game, called put, that was as popular as gleek and noddy during the Tudor dynasty.

History

It is generally agreed by every expert and researcher in the field of playing cards that the game of post and pair clearly derives from the game of primero. Due to its gaming mechanics and resemblance with Primero and its variants, it is easily implied that post and pair evolved into a faster-paced card game with the addition of rules borrowed from neighboring games, like the Tudor game named post, attested by The Oxford English Dictionary from the early 16th to the 17th centuries, which may have survived longer in local versions.
Charles Cotton, in his 1674 The Complete Gamester, mentions that post and pair was particularly popular in the west of England, as much as all fours was popular in Kent, and fives in Ireland. And if Francis Willughby's 1816 Book of Games gives no rules for the game, Cotton describes it as a three-stake game - stakes being laid for Post, Pair and Seat - almost identical to three-card brag.

Game play

Three separate stakes are made by each player. After staking at "post" and then at "pair", and getting two cards, the players stake at "seat". A third card is dealt upwards and the best of the cards so dealt entitles the holder to the first stake. The order of priority being as above mentioned.
The second stake becomes the property of the player with the best hand. A pair-royal of aces is the best hand, and next, a pair-royal of any three court cards according to their value: three kings, three queens, three knaves, etc. If no one has a pair-royal, the highest pair wins, and next to this, the hand that holds the highest cards.
The third stake goes to the player with the best pair or cards totaling, or most approaching, twenty-one points, that is, two tens and an ace, with court cards counting as ten. Any player whose cards fall short of that number is entitled to receive a card or cards from the stock, in the hope of amending the point value of the hand, but if overdrawn, to beyond 21, is out of the game. In this respect, it is closely related to blackjack.
The eldest hand may pass and come in again, if any of the gamesters vye with a bet. If not, the dealer may plead it out, or double it.

Hand rankings

Post and pair was first mentioned in a list of games played by Gargantua of Gargantua and Pantagruel, a 1532 novel by François Rabelais.
Shakespeare mentions the vye of the game, named as "pair", in a dialogue between the character Rosaline and the Princess of France in a conversation about the courtier Berowne, in his early play Love's Labour's Lost, written in the mid-1590s.
In Ben Jonson's Masque of Christmas, the card game of post and pair is introduced as one of his children, thus characterizing him as a knave. According to the A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases and Ancient Customs of the Fourteenth Century, by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, written in 1868, pur was the term given to the knave or jack in the game of post and pair. It seems to be formed by an abbreviation of pair-royal corrupted into purrial, similar to how pair-royal has since been otherwise corrupted into prial.
The game is mentioned in Canto Six of Walter Scott's epic poem Marmion as a "vulgar" game played at Christmas. Post and pair is also prominently mentioned in A Woman Killed with Kindness by Thomas Heywood.