How To Play Batak: A Beginner's Guide To Turkey's Favorite Trick-Taking Card Game
In Turkey, Batak is a fixture of coffeehouses, student dorms and family living rooms, and many people learn it the moment they start university. The game goes by different names and is played with plenty of house rules, but the basics are the same everywhere. Here is how it works, from the deck to the main variants and a few tips to avoid going under.
Batak is played with a standard 52-card deck.
The deck has four suits: diamonds, spades, hearts and clubs. The ranking inside each suit is the same, from highest to lowest: ace, king, queen, jack, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2.
One core rule: you must keep raising the cards on the table. Say a 7 of hearts is led and you hold the 5, 9 and king of hearts. You have to play at least the 9. If you can't beat what's on the table, you may play any card. Groups often tweak this rule among themselves.
Classic Batak
Four players each get 13 cards. Shuffle, have the player on your left cut, and deal one at a time or in fours. Before starting, agree on a target score (for example 51) or a number of hands.
After the deal, players bid in turn, starting from at least 5, or pass. The highest bidder starts the hand. Fail to take as many tricks as you bid and you lose that many points, while the other players score the tricks they took. Scores are kept on a simple tally sheet, and a notebook does the job at home.
There are several popular variants, each with its own twist.
Buried Batak (3 players)
Each player gets 16 cards and the last 4 go face down on the table. Bidding usually starts at 8 or 11, depending on the group, and the winner names trumps. In the regular version, the winner picks up the 4 cards and discards their 4 weakest. In the riskier 'bloody' version, they discard 4 cards before seeing what's on the table, so the hidden cards may contain no trumps at all.
Partnership Batak (4 players)
Two teams of two, scored together, with bids starting at 8. Partners can't discuss their hands. Once the bid is won, the winner's partner lays all their cards face up by suit, and the bid winner plays from that hand too.
Spades-trump Batak
Spades are always trumps. Each player calls how many tricks they expect to take, and may take at most 2 more than that. Go over and you lose points: call 4 and take 7, and you get -3.
A few tips
Bid based on the suit where you hold your strongest cards, and start at the minimum rather than going high.
Count trumps and track which high cards have already been played. Each suit has 13 cards.
Don't burn your highest side cards in the first round. Read the table first.
If you hold only trumps and one other suit, drawing out the trumps first can let you take the rest of the hand.
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