Bester Bauer

Bester Bube ("Best Bower"), also Fiefkort mit 'n besten Buren ("Five Cards with the Best Bowers"), is an historical German card game for 3–6 players played with a Piquet pack. It is one of the Rams group of card games characterised by allowing players to drop out of the current game if they think they will be unable to win any tricks or a minimum number of tricks.''Card Games: Rams Group''
at www.pagat.com. Retrieved 16 Oct 2018 It may be an ancestor of Five-Card Loo.

Names

The game goes under a variety of dialectical names, some named after the top card the "Best Bower"; these include Bester Bube or Bester Bauer (High German); Bester Buern or Bester Buur (Hamburg); Bester Buur (Holsteinish) or Beste Boer(en) (Dutch).

It is often equated in the literature with a game whose name means "five cards", after the five cards dealt to a hand, and variously spelt Fünfkart (High German), Fiefkarten; Fiefkaart, Fiefkort or Fiefander (Holsteinish). In Low German it was Fiefkaart or Fiefkartl; in Mecklenburgish, Fiefkoort. In Holstein, the game was called ''Fiefkaart'' or ''Fiefander''. Although Bester Bube is sometimes equated in the literature with Five Cards, the latter may have been the forerunner of Bester Bube played ''without'' the feature of two top Jacks, hence why Seelmann, in commenting on Reuter's 1867 work, ''De Reis’ nah Konstantinopel'', reports that ''Fünfkart'' "was mostly called ''Fiefkort mit'n besten Buren''" ("Five Cards with the Best Bowers").

A third name sometimes equated with Bester Bube relates to the flush or sequence that sometimes scores in the game; these include Lenter (East Frisian); Lenterspiel (Low German); Lanterlu, Lanturlu or Lanterlui (Dutch). The latter is clearly related to the English name of the game Lanterloo. ''Lenter'' is equated with ''Bester Buur'' by Schütze (1800), but it was also a separate game in its own right.

History

The game is recorded in the 18th and 19th centuries in German and Dutch game anthologies and dictionaries, appearing as early as 1777 in an ordinance for the city of Hildesheim in Lower Saxony issued under the authority of the King of Great Britain and Hanover that regulated gambling games. This stated that "card games in which the stakes in many places are very high and especially the game which is called Bester Bauer or Five Cards, Five Pfennigs (''Fünf Karten, Fünf Pfennig''), is played for five groschen and the so-called bête (''Beet'') is allowed to rise to the highest level... especially card games, whatever they are called, are not to be played for more than 4 pfennigs..." Moreover, "the game which is called Bester Bauer should never be played higher than 5 card, 5 pfennigs, and the bête should not rise to more than 3 stakes."

The game is also recorded in 1781, in a Low German dictionary where it is equated with ''Lenter-Spiel'',Dähnert (1781), p. 63. and in 1785, as ''Bestebauer-Spiel'', a game with its aficionados in Göttingen. In 1802 it is mentioned as a "people's card game" in a Holstein dialect dictionary, both as "Lenter" and "Besten Buur", and ''buuren'' is described as "playing the card game of besten Bauren ic in which the ''Spadenbuur'' or ''Pique Bauer'' ("Jack of Spades", also figuratively a foolish person) is the highest card which beats all the others."Schütze (1800), p. 194. It is also recorded in 1808 in ''Das neue königliche l'Hombre'' as "Bester Bube"''Das neue Königliche l’Hombre'' (1808), pp. 323/324. and by 1836 Fünfkart was described as a game played by the lower classes in Mecklenburg, exclusively with French-suited cards, alongside Dreikart, Schafskopf and Solo, while the dignitaries