Basic Strategies in Gin Rummy
Which card to pick up?
Opponent discards a jack - pick up the discarded jack
However, if you only had one jack, as in the hand show below, you'd be better off taking a card from the draw pile.
Opponent discards a jack - don't pick it up
Choosing which card to discard is not as easy as choosing which card to pick up, and amounts to a lot of the strategy of the game. However, you generally want to discard cards with high point values which don't fit into a set (10's, jacks, queens, and kings, for example).
In the hand shown below, for example, you'd probably want to discard the nine of diamonds.
Discard the nine of diamonds
Copyright 1999, Freeverse Software All rights reserved.