Court Piece Terms

In Court Piece terms, the rung is the trump suit, the hakem is the player who calls it, a sir is one trick, and a kot is a sweep. Those four words carry most of a hand, and almost none of them gets translated, even when the players are speaking English; the table talks in Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi and Sindhi. Below is what each word means, including the ones that are the same word spelt three ways.

Rung, the trump

Rung (رنگ) is the trump suit, and the word simply means colour. You will also hear turrup, hukum, plain trump or, from Persian and Iranian players, the hokm.

Hakem and tehrvin

The hakem (حاکم) is the player who names the rung. The word means ruler, and the role is exactly that: they see five cards before anyone else and commit the whole hand to a suit on that evidence alone. Tehrvin means thirteenth, and it is the caller's alternative to a redeal: declare it and the trump becomes whatever suit their thirteenth card turns out to be. Our app does not offer the tehrvin call; it offers one redeal when all five cards are below a Jack.

Sir, the trick

A sir is one trick: four cards, one from each player. It is the unit the whole game is counted in, and it gives two of the variants their names. Single Sir means every trick stands alone, so win it and it is yours. Double Sir means tricks stack into a pile and you sweep the lot by winning two in a row, which turns a quiet hand into a scramble.

Court, kot, coat

A Court is winning all thirteen tricks in a hand where your own side called the trump. It scores 13. You will see it written Court, Kot and Coat, and the game itself is called Coat Pees by plenty of players for exactly this reason: they are all the same word, and no spelling is more correct than another. Winning seven tricks to six is not a Court; that is an ordinary win worth 7.

Bavan and Goon Court

A Bavan is winning all thirteen tricks when the other side called the trump. It scores 52, and bavan is simply the Urdu word for fifty-two; the name is the number. Goon Court is the same thing under a different name, and you will also see it written bavney or baunie. In the main game of our app it is called a Goon Court. It is the result every table tells stories about, because you had no say in the trump and swept the hand anyway.

More on the Goon Court, the 52 sweep

Bayasi, the eighty-two

Bayasi means eighty-two, and it is the rarest claim in the game: a player shows their hand to the opponents and declares they will take all thirteen tricks anyway. Playing with your cards face up against three people who can see them is as difficult as it sounds, which is why the score is what it is.

The card names

Cards are almost never called by their English names at the table. The court cards are the ikka (ace), the badshah (king), the begum or malka (queen), and the ghulam, very commonly called the gola, for the jack. Below them the names run on the numbers: dahla (also written dehla) for ten, nahla (nehla) for nine, athi for eight, satti for seven, chhikki for six, panji for five, chauki for four, tiggi for three and duggi for two. The suits are hukam (spades), paan (hearts), eent (diamonds) and chirya (clubs).

Renege

To renege is to hold a card of the suit led and play something else, pretending to be void. Because following suit is compulsory, it is not a slip but cheating, and a single one can turn a whole hand. At a physical table it depends entirely on being caught. Playing online it cannot happen at all: the game only lets you play cards that are legal.

Names for the game itself

Court Piece, Coat Pees, Rung, Rang, Kot Pees, Hukum and Troeff Call are all names for the same family of game, and which one you use mostly says where you learned it. Troefcall is the Surinamese-Dutch branch, carried there by indentured labourers from South Asia, and it has drifted enough to be worth its own page.

Also known as Court Piece · Coat Pees · Hukum · حکم · Rung · رنگ · Troeff Call · Trump