The History of Thousand — Where the Game Came From, and Trivia

Thousand belongs to a family of marriage games whose oldest documented member, Mariage, appears in the sources in 1715 in Leipzig. Nobody knows the year Thousand itself came into being or who devised it: none of our sources gives either, and the older stories about its origin are hypotheses. This page separates the facts, for which we give a source and the date we checked it, from conjecture.

At a glance

• Thousand is related to Mariage, sixty-six, Schnapsen and mariasz: all of them score points for a king and a queen of one suit.
• The name is the goal of the game: pagat explains it as the target score, 1000 points.
• The game with bidding, a kitty (musik in Polish) and marriages has no documented date or author.
• The oldest description of Thousand we found is a book from 1974.
• Mickiewicz mentions mariasz three times in Pan Tadeusz, and Thousand not once.

The family of marriage games: a timeline

The conclusion: for Thousand we have sources only from the second half of the 20th century, and for its relatives from three centuries earlier. What connects the one with the other is still hypotheses.

Mariasz, the Polish relative

In the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita) people played mariasz: with 36 cards, for two, to 131 points (the “polished” variant used 24 cards). The highest card was the trump queen, called the pamfil, worth 11 points. The word mariasz also meant the pair itself, the king and queen, which in Thousand we call a marriage. Jędrzej Kitowicz, describing the customs under Augustus III, describes mariasz with 24 cards.

Polish Wikipedia says that Thousand descends from the Old Polish game of mariasz. It does not give a document that would show this.

Mickiewicz and mariasz

In Pan Tadeusz (1834) the word mariasz occurs three times, which we checked in the full text of the poem:

• in Book II the Judge plays mariasz with the Bernardine (Father Robak) and listens to the story so intently that he sits with a card raised to strike;
• in Book VI, after the quarrel in Soplicowo, nobody feels like cards for mariasz;
• in Book XII the Steward recalls Cybulski: “Co żonę przegrał, grając w mariasza z Moskalem” (“who lost his wife playing mariasz with a Muscovite”; A. Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz).

There is no Thousand in the poem. The common opinion that Mickiewicz described Thousand is untrue; he mentions its ancestor, if hypothesis B is accepted.

Thousand after the war

The educators of the Pan Tadeusz Museum describe Thousand as a game popular among the Polish working class after the Second World War, alongside sixty-six and oczko (a Polish game similar to blackjack), while bridge was supposedly condemned in those circles as a game of capitalists — according to that page until 1956. It is an educational page, not research, and it gives no figures on popularity.

Why “1000”?

Many games in this family are named after their goal: sixty-six, 1001 and Thousand itself. Pagat states outright that the name of the game refers to its goal: 1000 points. Why the goal is exactly a thousand and not five hundred, the sources are silent.

One thing can be counted: in games of our bots under house rules three players need on average 25.2 deals to reach 1000 (Thousand statistics). That is about twenty-five deals. Why exactly that many, the sources do not say.

One game, many names

“Russian Schnapsen” is a name of Thousand itself, not a separate game. Do not confuse it with the German game 1001 with a 24-card deck, in which the marriages have different values (clubs 100, spades 80, hearts 60, diamonds 40; Wikipedia).

Where and how it is played

• Countries. Pagat lists Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and Lithuania, and in its introduction also Kazakhstan; it speaks of popularity in Eastern Europe, including the Baltic countries.
• In Poland. It is played at the table and online: Kurnik has Thousand for 2 to 4 players, and municipalities organise tournaments: on 29 November 2022 the III Thousand tournament for the mayor’s cup was held in Siedliszcze, with three players at a table (rules). In the south of Poland, according to Polish Wikipedia, a four-player variant in pairs, with five cards, is popular.
• Two styles of rules. In Poland you more often meet the lock from 800 or 900 points, and in descriptions from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine (pagat.com) the barrel from 880. Details: variants.
• No nationwide rules. We found no Polish, Russian or Ukrainian federation of Thousand. “Tournament rules” are in practice a rulebook that municipalities copy from one another.

Trivia

• The ten outranks the king. Thousand belongs to the “ace–ten family” (English Wikipedia), in which the ten stands right after the ace. For people who know other games that is the first trap: tips for beginners.
• Polish letters on cards: W, D, K, A. A patent for “playing cards”, filed in 1934, describes the indexes A, K, D and W (W = walet, the jack; D = dama, the queen).
• Ukrainians also say «штука». Ukrainian Wikipedia gives, next to the name «Тисяча», the nickname «штука», literally “a piece”, used for a thousand.
• Russian Wikipedia has no article on this game. There was one, but it was deleted in 2021 after a discussion, on the grounds that it described only one of many variants of the rules, without encyclopaedic information (discussion). A good reminder of why we give a source for every rule.
• Meldunek is a German word. According to Wiktionary it comes from German Meldung, “report”: you report a meldunek.
• In Austria the bidding starts at 90. In eastern Austria Thousand is “Russisches Schnapsen”, often also called “Ruasseln”, and according to German Wikipedia the compulsory first call there is 90, not 100. The declarer’s trick points are also rounded to tens: with a contract of 150 and a marriage worth 60, a result of 84 gives 80 and the game is lost, and 85 gives 90 and wins.
• Russians “praise” the trump. According to CycloWiki a marriage is «хваль» in Russian, and declaring it is «захвалить», that is “to praise”; at the table you hear «хвалю», «она», «мать» or simply «сто». Only the spades marriage, the cheapest (40), has its own nickname: «гниль», “rot”.
• On the kitty, on the hundred, on the prikup. In Polish the player to the dealer’s left is “on the kitty” (na musiku), and the Siedliszcze tournament rulebook (link) also says they are “on 100”. In Russian it is «сидящий на сотне», “sitting on the hundred” (livegames). The dealer who sits out CycloWiki calls «сидящий на прикупе», and Kurnik says “na musie”.
• The ritual of cutting the deck. CycloWiki describes a custom: after the deck is cut, the dealer peeks at the bottom card. A nine is unwelcome there, because a third one in a row costs the cutter 120 points, so the dealer may announce it theatrically, counting «сорок» and «восемьдесят» (40 and 80). A jack from the bottom is “married off”, that is put into the middle of the deck, and in some companies you flick the cutter on the nose with it.
• The bomb stirs disputes. Polish Wikipedia writes that the rules of the bomb arouse much controversy, so they have to be agreed before play: most often it may be thrown only with the forced 100, in other homes up to 120, and sometimes at every bidding, in which case the opponents get half of the bid each (a bid of 210 gives 110 each). Advanced players often prefer to play without it, because leaving someone “on the kitty” is also a tactic.

Myths and misunderstandings

What we do not know

• when and where the game came into being, and who devised it;
• why the goal is 1000 points;
• where the marriage values 100, 80, 60 and 40 come from (our hypothesis: marriages);
• since when it has been played in Poland, in the USSR and in Kazakhstan: we have memories and blogs, not documents;
• where the Polish name musik for the kitty comes from (glossary).

If you know a source with a date, a book or a programme from the old days that mentions Thousand, we will add it here, saying where it comes from.