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By Sunday afternoon, the party had ended at the Raleigh-Durham Embassy Suites. The card tables were gone, over $16,000 in prize money had been awarded to the top 20 finishers, and the hotel staff were already bracing for their next convention.
But Jay Buxton, 58, the tireless president of the National Pinochle Association—freshly re-elected to a third two-year term—sat off to one side of the ballroom, still bubbling with enthusiasm.
“FIRE,” he said. “It’s an acronym. Fun. Integrity. Respect. Engagement. That’s my vision for the future of the NPA.”
Nearly 200 pinochle players from across the country had converged on North Carolina’s capital for the 2025 Championship Tournament, the 43rd annual gathering since the group’s founding in 1981. It was, as always, a predominantly Black crowd. Players came from Los Angeles, Detroit, Miami, Baltimore, Kansas City, Atlanta, and numerous other cities, bringing their pinochle decks and score sheets, trunks of merchandise and club memorabilia, nicknames, and grudges. Above all, though, they brought a shared dream of keeping a game they love alive.
I love that game, too. I’d traveled to Raleigh from Portland, Oregon, to cover the tournament as a reporter, but also to participate (an arrangement that, over the course of 96 hours, I’d come to fleetingly, but intensely, regret).
I grew up playing pinochle, but since my father’s death we’ve lacked enough players to get a game going. My big Middle Eastern family was scattered across the country, and the pinochle battles of my childhood—loud contests between my grandparents and parents and aunts and uncles that lasted deep into the night—were becoming distant and gauzy memories. Participating in the NPA tournament was extreme, but I thought it might reconnect me to a version of the world I’d lost.
Pinochle is a cooperative card game played by four people in two sets of partners. The version popularized by the NPA is the game’s most common variation, though regional differences exist across the country.
Lamont Jones writes in his book The Gist of Bid Whist: The Culturally-Rich Card Game from Black America that games like pinochle are “social games that reward teamwork and enable participants to enjoy the camaraderie of fellow players.” Both pinochle and bid whist—a trick-taking card game that’s also partnership-based—were broadly popularized in the United States by Pullman Porters, the all-Black railway workers who traveled from city to city in the second half of the 19th century and carried the game with them.
But pinochle, like many traditional card games, faces an uncertain future. In 2015, The New York Times canceled its bridge column after 80 years of publication, a sign of how such games have struggled to maintain their cultural foothold. Longtime players are aging and dying, and there are fewer new ones to take their place.
This concern had been weighing heavily on Buxton ahead of this year’s tournament. “It all had become so tense and serious,” he said. “It wasn’t about the fun of it anymore. And that’s just not sustainable.”
Though the tournament was open to any dues-paying member of an NPA pinochle club, only the most committed players were making the trip. Traveling to the event, which takes place in a different city every year, costs money. So does staying in a hotel and renting a car.
“If it’s not fun,” Buxton mused, “what are we doing? I think it was important that we restored that.”
Around the Table
My own memories of the game date back to Friday nights at my grandparents’ house, when all the adults would play, drink red wine, and smoke cigarettes around a long mahogany dining room table purchased for $199 at Sears.
The table had a leather pad to protect its wood, but over the years, cinders and ash from those cigarettes had burned holes through the pad. This created problems for card games. When you dealt from one end of the table to the other, it was difficult to slide the cards as far as they needed to go without overturning them and resulting in a misdeal.
But then, one day: a revelation. My grandfather filled the holes with wax. The joy I got from sliding playing cards across the waxy, ice-like leather is something I have not forgotten 40 years later. I can still close my eyes and see my 85-year-old grandfather, with his graying combover and enormous Coke-bottle bifocals, smiling as I slide him his cards.
My grandfather, who was born in Aleppo, had learned a version of pinochle (called bézique) while serving in the military. At 17, he’d volunteered for the Legion of the Orient, a French-led unit of Armenian and Syrian exiles based in Cyprus during the First World War.
Card games and soldiers tend to go together, since war, between its episodes of terror, has vast stretches of empty time to fill. Cards are small, portable, and light; they can be tucked into a jacket pocket or rucksack.
It’s no coincidence, then, that many of the members of the National Pinochle Association I met last month were Black Vietnam War veterans; pinochle has always been played wherever soldiers and cards could be found.
Just a Game
The first day of the tournament, a Thursday, began with a prayer.
“Dear Lord,” NPA Vice President William Satterwhite said, “help us remember that this is just a game.” Yes, Lord, several people in the audience responded. “We need to support each other. We need to be thankful and grateful for this day.” Amen, the crowd replied.
We played in quartets, swapping partners after every fourth deal. Four hands were played with each partner, then rotated one seat to the left. What seemed like a simple logistical quirk was also a fascinating psychological exercise: an opponent in one hand could immediately become a partner in the next.
If I’d been a man of faith, perhaps I would have thought of Matthew, 5:44: “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
As it was, I got off to a rocky start. I had the bad luck of being the “A” player at my first table, and thus responsible for the initial deal. My hands wouldn’t stop sweating and shaking. This made the “wash” of the cards—a basic maneuver where you stir both decks in a massive pile on the tabletop and then quickly straighten them out to run them through an automatic shuffler—nearly impossible. The cards stuck to my wet fingertips and, as the other players at the table looked at me with what felt like the intensity of a thousand burning suns, I dropped the shuffler tray onto the ground.
My partner, Cedric Rahmings, could see that I was a mess. As I struggled to put 20 cards in front of each player, the 47-year-old from Miami tried to take the focus off of me. I’d already told everyone that I was a writer, and so he started talking about his favorite novel, Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth.
“That’s a long book,” I managed, as if this were a brilliant observation.
“It flew by, though,” Rahmings replied. He looked at my hands. “Calm down,” he added. “No need to be nervous.”
Explaining pinochle presents a classic Catch-22. Each hand unfolds in three sequential phases: (1) the auction, (2) the meld, (3) the gameplay. But you can’t truly understand one without already understanding the others. The “auction” is meaningless without the context of the gameplay, which in turn depends on the “meld.” It’s an instructional ouroboros. How do you learn? You learn by knowing how to play.
But the auction is unquestionably foundational, and it’s the most intimidating piece of the game for a beginner.
Every hand begins with the auction. Once the (sweaty) cards are dealt, the process starts with the player to the left of the dealer. Sequentially, each player can choose to either raise the bid, or withdraw from the bidding entirely. Once you withdraw, you’re out for good.
The bidding continues around the table, sometimes for multiple rounds, until only one player remains. That winner earns the right to name the trump suit (the “power” suit that beats all others for that hand), typically choosing the suit where their own cards are strongest.
There are problems and dangers in this bidding process. If you drive the bid too high—overestimating the strength of your cards—you can fail to “meet” your bid through the gameplay, and incur a large penalty.
And so it was, in my fifth hand of the tournament, that I made a critical error. I had just switched seats; my new partner, Robernetta Thompson, was a demure woman with a Donna Reed bob and a quiet, measured style of play.
In our first hand together, I made a grave mistake in the auction phase, misunderstanding what she was trying to communicate to me. Subsequently, I drove the bid much too high.
By the time the gameplay began, it was clear that we were doomed. Even if we’d played the hand without errors, perfection wouldn’t have been enough to save us. And so we were both assessed a penalty, one that was unquestionably my fault.
After the hand, Thompson looked at me with incredulity. “You do that again,” she said, “and they’ll run you out of here.”
I kept making mistakes all night—unforced errors in play, some because of nervousness, some for reasons I couldn’t explain. The tournament games moved incredibly, exhilaratingly fast. The first evening ended around 11:35, and by then I’d played 36 hands over six hours and scored a meager 1,690 points. If I wasn’t in last place, I was certainly close.
“If it’s not fun, what are we doing? I think it was important that we restored that.”
Jay Buxton, president of the National Pinochle Association
I saw Kevin Kelly, 60, the NPA’s director of research and education, out in the hallway. He didn’t look surprised when I told him what happened.
“I love baseball,” he said. “But I can’t go to Tiger Stadium and play with the Tigers. This is the Major Leagues.”
I got a non-alcoholic beer from the bar and drifted through the lobby, adrenaline still humming in my body. Outside, the midnight air was thick and warm. Crickets and katydids built a cocoon of sound in the lamplit dark. For a moment, I wished I’d never quit smoking.
When I came back in and headed toward the elevators, a commotion from the ballroom pulled me off course. At least four tables, I saw, were running pickup games. I spotted Rahmings and wandered over.
By any measure, 36 hands of pinochle is exhausting: the constant calculation, the speed of the game, the pressure of knowing that one mistake could swing the hand—and that your partner’s score is dependent on your own. I was drained.
But for Rahmings and the other members of Miami’s Magic City Pinochle Club, the night was just beginning. They were drinking cheap whiskey cut with ginger ale, laughing and making fun of each other.
I sat down at the edge of the table, hesitant at first. But within minutes, it felt like being back at my grandparents’ house—the same loud, joyous bravado, at once intimate and familiar. Anthony Collins, a recently retired 32-year veteran of the Miami Police Department, leaned over and welcomed me. “Don’t worry,” he said, “everyone struggles at their first tournament.”
Collins told me that he’d quite literally written the book on the game, a self-published manual called Winning Pinochle Strategies, and that his friends never let him forget that when they beat him.
I watched the Miami crew for nearly an hour; I learned the next day that they’d kept going until 4:15 a.m.
Just before I left, though, Rahmings cut down an opponent’s ace with an unexpected late trump. He tipped his chair back and roared with joy.
“God gave me the pinochle gift!” he shouted. “I can see through the backs of the cards!” He slammed his fists against the table. “I love this game!”
Finding the Young Guns
By the next evening, I’d acclimated. I managed to place 55th. Not too shabby, I thought. Totally respectable. But Thursday and Friday were just the practice before the main event, scheduled for the entirety of Saturday and Sunday.
By the last few hands that weekend, I was exhausted. I found myself making even more stupid mistakes. Late in one hand as the cards dwindled, I played the wrong suit, creating a penalty situation that required three separate referees to untangle. The pressure of resolving this penalty felt enormous. Afterward, I excused myself and went to the bathroom, where I broke down in the stall and wept.
“I love baseball. But I can’t go to Tiger Stadium and play with the Tigers. This is the Major Leagues.”
Kevin Kelly, NPA director of research and education
But this was the exception. Mostly, my tables were enjoyable: like the one with Lillian Brown, Aletta Fields, and Wanda Goodman—a member of the Tidewater Virginia area’s Young Guns Pinochle Club. After nearly two hours joking our way through the hands, my face actually ached from smiling.
Throughout the weekend, the NPA’s Kelly sought me out to see how I was doing, clearly worried about this writer with a nostalgic desire to step into the batter’s box against major league pitching.
As we talked, I wasn’t surprised to learn Kelly’s biggest worry: his organization’s declining numbers. There are only three remaining pinochle clubs in North Carolina, he told me: the Sandhill Pinochle Club, the Queen City Players, and the Raleigh Area Pinochle Players.
And the trendlines are stark. Before COVID, the NPA had more than 1,000 members. Now they are down to 551. The average player age is 75.
“How we are not treating this as a crisis is beyond me,” Kelly said. “What are we doing to attract new people? We eat, we drink, we have a good time. But how do we find the next generation of players?
“Time is not helping,” he said. “We can see, quite easily, what time is doing.”
What Has Been
On Sunday morning, a small group gathered in the Embassy Suites conference room for a memorial service for the 21 NPA members who’d died over the past year.
Carol Simmons, the NPA’s corresponding secretary, came to the front of the room as the ceremony began. Simmons is 71, but looks barely 60 despite surviving cancer, a heart attack, and a stroke. She drew herself together, straightened her back, and began to sing.
It was a towering, a cappella rendition of The Caravans’ 1964 gospel hit, “Walk Around Heaven,” written by Cassietta George in her final year with the group. Simmons’ version, sung for her friends, partners, and fellow competitors, echoed throughout the partitioned space. I let the music surround me. It was a hymn; it was a prayer; it was a reminder of what had been, what was, and what would be, once more.
And then the song ended. Everyone stood up and filed quietly out of the room, returning to the tables for the tournament’s conclusion.
Like many NPA events, the 2025 championship came down to the wire. Despite holding a weak final hand, Minnie Cooper of the DC-area Pinochle Aces Club managed to fend off a late charge from Terence Hansbrough—clinching the title by a mere 68 points, 5798 to 5730. Her final score was nearly double my own.
Ultimately, though, my final placement—139th out of 148—was a footnote. I hadn’t really come to Raleigh to play in the major leagues. I’d come looking for a ghost, a way to feel the presence of my father and grandfather across the waxy, scarred surface of a card table.
I’d found that, but I’d also found something else: a fierce, loving, and vulnerable community, looking to chart its course into the next half century.
As I headed to the Raleigh airport for my flight back to Portland, I thought about Kelly’s sense of crisis, his fear of what time was doing.
No ideas but in things, I often teach my writing students.
And so I remembered the sound of Carol Simmons’s voice filling a hotel ballroom and the joyous roar of Cedric Rahmings. I remembered my queasy despair at incurring that penalty, and bringing my partners’ scores down. I remembered the quiet welcome of the Magic City Pinochle Club—a circle of strangers who’d made me feel like I was home.
Correction: Carol Simmons’ age has been corrected. She is 71.
Pauls Toutonghi’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Outside Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and numerous other publications. He teaches at Lewis & Clark College. His novel, The Refugee Ocean, came out from Simon & Schuster in 2023.
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