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to Skat Home PagePrimitive Skat was developed around 1811 by residents of Altenburg in Thuringia not far from Leipzig, Germany. Lacking television and radio, of course, card games were popular and the Altenburgers had a preference for Tarot. This was a three-handed game of Italian origin that had come to Altenburg by way of Austria. The cards that we associate today with fortune telling were actually trump cards ranking above the normal card pack. According to legend, the coachman of one of the Tarot players had traveled to Bohemia on business and, while there, observed people playing the Wendish game of Schafkopf, a four-handed game that was unknown to him. He brought the game back with him to Altenburg and introduced it in the Tarot club where it met with a cold reception. The Tarot players who were accustomed to playing in groups of three were reluctant to add a fourth in order to play Schafkopf. The new game was sufficiently intriguing, however, that some experimentation led to the three-handed, thirty-two card game of Skat.
The new game spread to the University in nearby Leipzig and from there was carried all over Germany. By 1876 immigrants had brought it to the United States where it was played in Milwaukee, St. Louis, New York, and Pittsburgh, among other places. The first American invitational Skat tournament was staged in Brooklyn in 1888 and the North American Skat League was incorporated in 1898, one year before its counterpart in Germany! Also around the turn of the century, the U.S. Playing Card company in Cincinnati began production of Skat cards with the traditional German suits. As the game spread, people began to experiment with different methods of play. The situation became quite chaotic. People from different areas played by different rules and found it difficult to agree on a sufficient number of them to be able sit down and play together. The eleventh Skat Congress in Altenburg in 1928 tried to standardize the rules and streamline play. These changes were generally adopted in Germany, but ignored in the United States where players continued to play by the old rules or, as in Texas, adopted a method of play that was a mixture of the two traditions.
This division and, some claim, a reluctance to allow women to play in tournaments, led to a decline in the number of players in the United States to the point where Skat was almost relegated to a crossword puzzle entry. The computer age may be changing this, however. There are now several computer programs that play Skat. This is bound to make it easier to learn the game and to find willing partners. How many "netters" on the WWW will know that they are following in the footsteps of a coachman from Thuringia?
© 1995, John W. Sell