Marriages (Melds) in Thousand — What They Are Worth and Why

A marriage (in Polish meldunek; in general card-game language a “meld”) is a pair: a king and a queen of the same suit, which a player declares by leading one of those cards. A hearts marriage is worth 100 points, diamonds 80, clubs 60, spades 40. The suit of the declared marriage immediately becomes the trump.

Marriage	Cards	Points
hearts ♥	K♥ + Q♥	100
diamonds ♦	K♦ + Q♦	80
clubs ♣	K♣ + Q♣	60
spades ♠	K♠ + Q♠	40

All four marriages: 280 points in total.

How to declare a marriage

You must lead, that is start a trick. The player who took the previous trick leads.
You hold both halves of the pair — the king and the queen of the same suit.
You play one of them and say “marriage” (or simply “a hundred”, “eighty”…).
From that moment the suit of the marriage is the trump — already in that trick. A further marriage changes the trump to its own suit.

You took a trick and you lead: you play K♥ and declare the marriage — +100, and hearts are trumps.

You may not declare a marriage in the first trick of the deal — a declarer who leads first must begin with an ordinary card. Any player may declare, not only the declarer: a defender who took a trick and leads with a pair also declares a marriage.

What a marriage gives

To the declarer — the points of a marriage count toward making the contract. Without a marriage you can make at most 120 points (that is what all the cards are worth), which is why without a marriage in hand you may not bid above 120. A marriage raises that limit to 120 plus the value of the marriages in your hand: with a spades marriage you may bid up to 160, clubs up to 180, diamonds up to 200, hearts up to 220, and with hearts and diamonds up to 300 (the table: bidding and the kitty).
To a defender — the marriage is added to their points for the deal (scoring rules: scoring).
Everything lying on the table is 400 points: 120 for the cards and 280 for the four marriages. That is a theoretical ceiling: Polish Wikipedia calculates that with three players you cannot make more than 360 (and that only with extremely bad play by the opponents), and gives 336 as the realistic maximum.

How often a marriage turns up

We calculated it exactly, going through every possible arrangement of the cards (no random samples):

Cards	When	At least one marriage	Hearts marriage
3	the kitty	4.3% (1 in 23)	1.1%
7	a hand after the deal (3 players)	28.5%	7.6%
10	a hand with the kitty, or a hand with two players	54.0%	16.3%
12	two players, after taking the kitty	70.4%	23.9%

The conclusion: after the deal more than one player in four holds a marriage, and a hand with the kitty about every second one. A whole marriage lies in the kitty in only 4.3% of deals. Much more often the kitty completes a pair: if you hold the king of hearts without the queen, the queen is in the kitty with a chance of 3 in 17 (about 18%) — because of the 17 cards you cannot see, 3 are in the kitty.

Why 100, 80, 60 and 40?

Thousand belongs to a family of games in which the marriage was known earlier: in Austrian Schnapsen and German sixty-six an ordinary marriage is worth 20, and a marriage in the trump suit 40. There the trump is set at the start of the deal, so the value of a marriage depends on whether the pair is in trumps.

In Thousand there is no trump at the start — it is the marriage that sets the trump. So the value cannot depend on the trump, and each suit has its own fixed price. On top of that, marriages here are much more valuable than in Schnapsen: a hearts marriage (100) is worth almost as much as all the cards in a deal (120). That makes marriages decide the bidding in Thousand.