How to play Skat: rules and examples

Published 2026-10-25 · Updated 2026-10-25

Learn with a physical deck and no money at stake. Knowing the rules does not establish legal permission to gamble.

Players: 3 active players
Deck: 32 cards: seven through ace
Goal: Win a declared contract without overbidding its value.

Skat puts one declarer against two temporary defenders. It has several contract families and a numerical auction, so this lesson starts with a suit game before introducing Grand and Null. It is a guide to learning the structure, not a replacement for the International Skat Order. Four people may rotate a sitting-out dealer, but only three hands participate in a deal.

Play a practice round, step by step

Deal three cards each, place two face down as the skat, then deal four each and three each. Everyone has ten cards. The player left of the dealer is forehand, followed by middlehand and rearhand.
Middlehand offers increasing game values to forehand, who holds or passes. Rearhand then bids against the survivor. The auction winner becomes declarer; bids concern game value, not a number of tricks.
Declarer may pick up the skat and discard two cards, or leave it untouched for a hand game. Declare a suit, Grand or Null. For a first practice deal, choose a suit contract and use the official valuation reference while bidding.
In a suit game, all jacks are trumps above the chosen suit: clubs, spades, hearts, diamonds. Remaining cards rank ace, ten, king, queen, nine, eight, seven. Follow the led suit, treating jacks as trump; when void, discard or trump freely.
Forehand leads the first trick regardless of declarer. The highest trump, or highest card of the led suit when no trump is played, wins and leads next. Count card points after ten tricks, including the skat for declarer.

In a hearts contract, these trumps descend from left to right.

The club jack beats the spade jack, which beats the heart jack, then diamond jack, then heart ace. The pictures do not belong to their printed suits for following-suit purposes in this contract. For a valuation illustration, holding the club jack but not the spade jack, with neither hand nor skat containing the spade jack, gives with one; adding the game level makes two. A plain hearts game then has value two times ten, or twenty, before any additional achieved levels. A winning basic game at that value records plus twenty; losing it records minus forty. This example assumes no overbid and no additional announcement or multiplier.

Points are not the bid

Aces count eleven, tens ten, kings four, queens three and jacks two: the pack contains one hundred twenty card points. A basic suit or Grand game requires at least sixty-one for declarer. Suit game value uses a base of nine for diamonds, ten hearts, eleven spades or twelve clubs, multiplied by the applicable consecutive-top-trump count and game levels. Overbidding can lose a game even with enough card points.

Grand has only the four jacks as trumps and a base of twenty-four. Null has no trumps, restores ordinary ace–king–queen–jack–ten–nine–eight–seven ranking, and requires declarer to lose every trick. Its values are fixed rather than calculated like suit contracts. Schneider, Schwarz, hand and open announcements add conditions; consult the full rules before using them.

Practice the two accounting systems

Create one column headed captured card points and another headed contract value. Place an ace in the first column and write eleven. Then write a sample hearts contract value in the second. The columns answer different questions: did declarer capture enough, and did the game justify the bid? Keeping them separate prevents a common misunderstanding before any complicated auction begins.

For a trump-sorting exercise, remove the four jacks and line them up in their special order. Put the remaining cards of a chosen suit beneath them. Now change the chosen suit while leaving the jacks in place. This visible rearrangement makes it easier to understand why the club jack is trump even when hearts were declared.

Common misunderstandings

Do not compare a bid directly with sixty-one captured points.
A jack must follow a trump lead, not its printed suit.
A sixty–sixty card-point split does not win a basic declarer contract.

Agree the variant before starting

Ramsch, Kontra and pub variations are not automatic parts of this lesson.
Use the complete valuation and overbid provisions for scored play.

Rules and further reading

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