Scoring

Hit your bid: 20 plus 10 per trick bid. Miss it: minus 10 per trick you were out by. Here is what that looks like in numbers, and what it does to the game.

That is the whole of it — no bonus for taking tricks, no special-card points, nothing else to remember. What follows is what those two lines look like in numbers, the place tables reliably get it wrong, and why this scoring turns an ordinary trick-taking game into a quite different one.

Hitting your bid

The one people get wrong at the table: a bid of zero is a real bid. Nought bid and nought taken is 20 points, not nothing. In the small early rounds a clean zero is often the best deal available.

Missing it

Over and under cost the same. There is no bonus for taking tricks, so a player who takes six having bid five is worse off than one who bid nothing and took nothing. This is the rule that stops it being an ordinary trick-taking game.

A round, worked through

Round 4, four players, so four tricks to go round. The table bid five between them — somebody is going to be disappointed.

Check: 2 + 1 + 0 + 1 = 4 tricks won, exactly the number of cards dealt. Run that check every round — if it does not come out, somebody has miscounted, always. The score sheet turns the row red when it does not add up.

Other scoring you may meet

Plain Oh Hell is often scored 10 plus 1 per trick, or 10 plus the tricks taken with nothing for a miss. The 20-plus-10 scoring above is the one used with the 60-card deck and the one almost every online version uses, including ours — the score sheet computes it with the very same function the Pythia game engine uses to score a live table, so the two cannot disagree.

The common variant worth knowing: scoring a successful zero by the round number rather than a flat 20, so a zero in round 8 is worth more than a zero in round 1. Reasonable — a zero in a long round genuinely is harder — but it makes the scoring need explaining. More on variants.