Stake the boodle cards, then shed your hand to claim them.
Also called Michigan or boodle. A staking game where money sits on four cards from a second deck and you win it by playing the matching card.
A 52-card deck, and four cards taken from a second deck — usually the ace of diamonds, king of clubs, queen of hearts and jack of spades. These are the boodle cards, laid face up in the middle.
Before each deal, every player places a chip on each of the four boodle cards. The dealer usually pays double.
Deal the whole deck out round the table, including one extra hand — a dead hand nobody plays. Hands will be uneven; that is fine.
The dealer may swap their hand for the dead hand unseen, or auction the right to do so.
The player to the dealer's left leads their lowest card in any suit. Whoever holds the next card up in that suit plays it, then the next, and so on upward toward the ace.
The sequence stops when the next card is in the dead hand or has already been played. Whoever played the last card starts a new sequence with their lowest card of a different suit.
If they have only the suit they just stopped in, play passes to the left.
Whenever you play a card matching one of the boodle cards, take all the chips on it.
The first player to shed every card ends the hand and collects one chip per card from everyone still holding cards.
Chips left on a boodle card stay there for the next deal, which is why the ace of diamonds can end up carrying a small fortune.