Card memory playing Jass (the Swiss national "sport")

General Memory Chat
1

Jass is played with four suits of nine cards each:
Ace, King, Ober, Unter, Banner (10), 9,8,7,6. High card wins the trick. Points are scored.

Since there are only 9 cards per suit I have visualized a 3x3 grid [tic tac toe!] for the trump suit and “checked” squares to see a pattern evolve as trump cards are played. This is the most critical information. (I’ve practiced this, but not used it in actual play.)

HOWEVER, it would be highly advantageous to know in each round ALL the cards already played, WHO played them, and what card is currently “BOCK” or the highest unplayed card in a suit. (If your partner plays a “Bock” you can “schmier” a valuable card, knowing he has won the trick.)

(Incidentally, the highest cards in the TRUMP suit are not Ace and King, but Bauer/Buur (Unter) at 20pts and Näll (9) at 14 pts. Ace and Banner then follow in value (11, 10 pts). There are also variations playing top-down and bottom-up without a trump suit where 8’s are worth 8 pts.
And even a “slalom” mode where these two alternate.)

The suits are Eichel (Acorn), Rose, Schilte (Shields), and Schelle (Bells).
I’ve used the major system to choose objects for each card, where the tens digit is the suit, called a “color” here–G(reen) R(ed) B(lue) yeL(low)–and then assigned 1-5 (t,n,m,r,l) top down as logical by importance and then bottom up for 6-9 (sh,k,v,p) numbers being numbers, for the individual cards/object pictures.

So a two-digit color:object gives me four groups of nine cards I can manipulate in some systematic way.

Can someone suggest a method for rapidly handling SUCCESSIVE rounds in an actual game? (Good players don’t take long to play!) How do you in effect cancel or disregard your memory of one round before the next begins? A different “room” for every round? A different story with the same characters? A third digit?

Any tips will be appreciated.

2

Hi Mr. Benson,

Just some small points:

  • Most of us can not willingly forget. You would have a better time rotating scenes for each round, with enough different scenes so that the first scene is sufficiently hazy so it can be re-used once you get back to it
  • For tracking trump cards, remembering who played which one would be better than a checkmark
  • You can have a location for each player and store their cards in sequence (as objects/imagery, which you already associated)
  • For “perfect” games you also want to know what they could still play, which is more difficult… You could scan all played cards, or keep a 6x6 board or 4x9 scene to track un-played cards
  • Reading players can be more helpful than having perfect knowledge of all cards
  • Using all this information and still playing at a good pace and keeping up with the banter is a matter of practice

Recommend you start by just tracking the trump cards, but remember to enjoy your Jass games too.
Happy playing! Let us know how it goes for you!

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Memorizing Cards Order-Agnostically with Bitmaps
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Thanks! Good advice. I’ll work first on your second tip come next Saturday when our regular foursome (w/ wife, niece, cousin) will be playing.

Meanwhile I’ve picked 36 memorable persons in four “colors” to memorize and attach to cards: Acorns from the family tree (we were a family nine!), Roses to wives and girl friends. Shields to Men-friends in my life, and finally nine musicians, my violin teachers and such, for the Schellen/Bells (to ring one).
And I’ve chosen 36 locations from my own life history in chronological order, but distributed successively to the four hands at the Jass table into 3x3 matrices. We’ll see how this goes. It won’t happen soon in actual play. In each of these geographical locations it would then be possible to create “rooms” to avoid repetition. However, an evening of play might be twice to 1000 pts, each time an unpredictable number of rounds (4+) . . . Stlll thinking about this.

Yes, the point is to have some fun! and keep up with the banter. (My wife and her cousin are old hands at Jass with 50+ years of experience, so they like to analyze who did what after a round! If I can learn to remember who played which trump cards, I can catch up fast. ha ha)

A question: When I read that someone is memorizing pairs of cards (for fast card memory) and maybe even clumping them in one locus, what exactly links the pairs in memory? Is the fourth card chain-linked somehow to the next first card? It’s unclear to me what actually happens to maintain order. (Especially for people memorizing a stack of decks!)

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Like how you split your objects into colors!

Regarding your question: Whether single cards or pairs, most people place multiple objects per locus (but generally 5 or fewer). The physical positioning or more vivid linking indicates the order at that locus.
So if one of your loci is a doormat, and the next your door, you could have four of your “card-people” arranged from left to right on the doormat. The fifth card would then be clinging to the top of your door.

When people talk about memorizing pairs of cards, they usually mean encoding two cards into one object.
E.g. in the Slate System, the (King Eichel, 8 Shellen) pair could be pronounced “dr-ay-f”, so the object could be Henri Dreyfus.

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Super. I understand now that the position is enough. Left to right or top to bottom.
And thanks for the Slate reference. I was just last night working on the possibility of incorporating words (phonemes) for images from three other languages that I use: Swedish, Russian and German. Basing on IPA and expanding to include zh (ж), for instance, somewhere else makes sense. I first liked the idea of “t (not d)” after using place of articulation as the basis for assigning in the Major system. k = g and so on. Now I have to think some more about this.
We have two t’s here. One aspirated, one not. Ten places of articulation? 0-9.
As for vowels, Swiss German has a few more to choose from (Phonologie – DiRes) , Russian has five pairs, (soft and hard), soft affecting the preceding consonant, but placement is important for pronunciation. eg. moloko (milk) has three different o’s. Swedish has lots of two-letter words.
Lots to consider here! Maybe it’s more efficient to stick to one language.
Maybe I don’t need 1,000 images for a card game.

Cheers!

6

Looks like you already came across one of the issues of most phonetic-based systems.

The only downside of using other languages like German or Russian, is the potential for generating duplicate objects, like Mund (0324) vs. mouth (0344).

Then for example 1040 “z-a-s”, it’s much more convenient to have засыпать available than to find some english image to relate to the “zas” sound.

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