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Keeping score at Burraco
Burraco has the liveliest count of any game here, and it is the only one where a hand can score below zero. A hand total combines four separate things: the value of the cards you melded on the table, the bonuses for completed seven-card melds, the bonus for going out, and finally the value of the cards still in your hand and in an unclaimed pot, which is subtracted.
Card values are the standard ones. A joker is worth thirty, a two — the wild deuce — twenty, an ace fifteen, tens and face cards ten each, and threes through nines five apiece. A clean burraco, a seven-card meld with no joker and no wild deuce, is worth two hundred points; a dirty one is worth a hundred. Going out is worth a hundred, and the partnership that never claimed its pot loses a hundred.
Why the totals swing so hard
The practical consequence is that the standings mean very little halfway through. A hand where you go out holding two clean burracos is worth over five hundred points; the same hand seen from the other side of the table, with an unclaimed pot and a fistful of cards, can come to less than nothing. That is normal, and it is why the scorer accepts negative numbers for this game: a partnership finishing a hand on minus seventy enters minus seventy exactly as it stands.
Using the scorer
The default target is two thousand and five, the most common one in Italy; plenty of tables play to two thousand or twelve hundred instead, in which case just read the totals and ignore the target shown. The hundred, two hundred and five hundred quick buttons match the bonuses you enter most — going out, dirty burraco, clean burraco — and the five-point step keeps you from typing totals that Burraco cannot produce.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a clean burraco worth?
- Two hundred points, provided the seven-card meld contains no joker and no wild deuce. With either of those it is a dirty burraco and worth a hundred.
- How do I enter a negative score?
- Type it with the minus sign. Burraco is the only game in the list where the scorer accepts negative values, precisely because a badly finished hand costs more than it earns.
- Who loses the hundred points for the pot?
- The partnership that failed to claim its pot before the hand ended. It is a fixed penalty, and you subtract it from the hand total before entering it.
- We play to two thousand, not two thousand and five.
- That is fine. The target shown is only a visual reference and does not end the game. Keep entering hands and stop at whatever target your table uses.