“Sets” can never be equal… unless your playing with a defective deck!

Note also that two players can never both have ‘carte blanche’ in the same hand (with a 32 card deck!)… Some web-sites talking about Piquet cite the possibility of both players having carte blanche are in error. (This is probably a hold-over from when the game was played with a 36 card deck).

For the record:

“Rubicon Piquet” Is not a vestige of an older version of the game, it is actually the more modern version of the game. It is the variation that uses ‘crossing the Rubicon’ in the end-score calculations. It uses six deals as stated above, unless tied, when two more deals are played. If still tied, it’s a draw.

The older version of the game is called “Cent”. The first player to 100 points wins. (the number of deals is unimportant). Usually in “Cent” if the loser has less than 50 points when the winner hits 100, he is ‘lurched’, and the winner wins a double game, similar to a ‘gammon’ in backgammon.

The Rubicon version of the game leads to more subtle stategic play (sometimes, depends on the score) towards the end of the partie. A player who is losing, and doesn’t think they will cross the Rubicon in the remaining hands, may decide to play to negate (equalize) scoring as much as possible, rather than playing to accumulate points (since the winner will be getting all the points anyway). So on a strategic level, it’s a bit deeper than Cent, where both players are simply trying to make as many points as possible up to the end of the game.

But the best fun to be had in a two-player card game is the modern game of Shithead, which we here in Cardiff play in a pared-down version where the only special cards are 2, 9 and 10.