After everyone is dealt their cards, the dealer puts the next card in the deck face-up on the table and the remaining cards face-down on a stack next to the face-up card. The dealer then deals until each player has eleven cards. After the cards are shuffled, the dealer asks the person to the right to cut the deck and try to get exactly eleven times the number of players, plus one. Two decks of cards and four players is the ideal setup. A canasta is, in essence, safe in its “basket.”īelow is a description of the Ardoin house rules on Canasta (like cooking, the “recipe” for this game, and others, may vary from household to household): It cannot be counted against the player’s

Table, the value of a canasta is secure even if it is incomplete. This image is from our first Christmas at the Stone Motel. In “Stone Motel – Memoirs of a Cajun Boy,” you’ll meet us all: Gilda, 10, Dickie, 6, Cassie, 14 (holding Scotty, 2), Glenda, 10, Morris, 8, and Andy, 12. The twins were quickly taken with Canasta, and so they in turn taught Dickie (nine) and me (eleven) to play, and we continued to do so long after the Sanders packed up their Ford station wagon and headed back home. She and her eldest daughter, Carlene (about fourteen) both devoted card-players, befriended my sisters Gilda and Glenda (who were around thirteen at the time) and taught them to play the game, with the four of them spread out on the floor of their kitchenette. Sanders had already been playing the game for more than a decade. Twenty years on, in the early 1970s, when Isobel Sanders and her family took up temporary residence in Rooms 16 and 17 at our little motel three miles east of Eunice, Louisiana, Mrs. By the 1950s the resulting version of Canasta spread like hives into North American homes. In the next decade the rules of the game evolved, modified by players all over South America. In 1939 in Montevideo, Uruguay, Segundo Santos and Alberto Serrato invented a rummy-like card game they named after the “baskets” of cards, or canastas the players would create along the way to winning. Christmas break is the perfect time to unplug from our phones, tvs, and whatnots, and, you know, face each other – playing and actually talking to one another. It’s a bit wonky to read but if you take it slow, you should be able to set up a rousing game for yourself and at least three others. This week I’m running this post about the game of Canasta once more (originally posted in May 2019).

American canasta rules for two players