It should be obvious that calling (and making) Tichu is a much more efficient way to score points. It's much more likely that you will score between 20 and 80 points on a normal hand. That means that if you play a regular hand where no one calls Tichu and no one scores a double win, the most you can hope for is 125 points. The Dragon is worth 25 points and the Phoenix is worth -25 points. That should be obvious but the question is: how best to get there? Where will your points come from? Consider that there are 100 points distributed among the 56 cards that make up a Tichu deck. To win at Tichu you need to accumulate 1000 points faster than the opposing team. If you haven't played Tichu before then perhaps this will spark an interest. If you are already a Tichu player then hopefully you'll find something here that helps your game. Some of these ideas were borrowed from others (Aaron Fuegi has a particularly excellent set of Tichu resources which can be found at ) and some of them are just observations that have come from my experience.

I'm quite certain that there are others who are better players than I am and with any luck, someone out there will read this article and have some ideas on how to improve upon what I've written here. Let me start by saying that while I have played hundreds of Tichu games, I don't consider myself to be the ultimate authority on the game. In this article I plan to focus on strategy and the nuances of the game. My earlier article explained the rules of the game and just barely hinted at strategy. This is part 2 of my two-part article on Tichu.

Tichu for two players online