Pick your five cards, your seat, and the turned-up card (or the suit you'd name in round two). The evaluator finds hands like yours in our simulation of over a million euchre deals and shows the average points your team scored by calling, passing, and going alone, plus how often the call was made or euchred.
How to Read the Result
- Expected points are the average net points for your team when players in your spot made that choice: your points minus the opponents’. Higher is better. A negative “Pass” number means the opponents tend to score when you pass, which happens when you hand them the next chance to call.
- Close call means calling and passing are within 0.1 points of each other. Either is reasonable; let the score decide (see score management).
- Make / march / euchred show how often hands like yours succeeded when they called.
Where the Numbers Come From
We simulated over a million euchre deals. Every time a player had to decide whether to call, we played the hand out three ways, calling, passing, and going alone, and recorded the result. Hands are grouped by seat, trump count, bowers, and off-suit aces, so each recommendation is based on thousands of real outcomes. The full tables and the limitations are on the euchre research page.
Quick Rules of Thumb from the Data
- First seat needs a genuinely strong hand: about three trump including a bower. You’re giving the turned card to the dealer, who is an opponent.
- The dealer’s partner can order up much lighter, because the card goes to your own team.
- The dealer should count the turned-up card as part of the hand. After the pickup, two trump including the Right Bower is enough to call; without a bower, you want three.
Want to practice these decisions? Play euchre against the computer. Its computer players use the same hand evaluation.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does the euchre hand evaluator work?
It groups your hand by the things that matter most (trump count, which bowers you hold, off-suit aces, and your seat) and looks up how hands like that performed in our simulation, where every decision was played out three ways: call, pass, and go alone. It recommends the choice that scored the most points on average.
What do the expected points mean?
They are the average net points for your team from that decision: points you score minus points the opponents score on that hand. +0.50 means that, on average, choosing that option gains your team half a point per hand compared with zero.
Why does the dealer's partner get different advice?
When the dealer's partner orders up, the turned-up card goes into their own team's hand, so a weaker hand is worth calling. When first or third seat orders up, they hand that card to an opponent, so they need a stronger hand.
Is the evaluator always right?
No tool is. It averages over many hands with the same features, so it can't see everything, such as a King guarded by its Ace, or the score of the game. Treat close calls as close, and adjust for the score: near the end of a game, a euchre can cost more than the points suggest.