Christie Matherne Hall
After a family holiday meal, some linger at the table, catching up with relatives, while others gather dishes and pack up leftovers for easy transport. Some orbit the living room couch to watch a football game and let the food digest. In parts of South Louisiana, some skip all that and gather their wits and their coins (or dollars, or Rolls-Royces) to play the cutthroat, trash-talking card game, bourré.
Though I was born with Matherne as a last name and grew up in the aforementioned region, I couldn’t recall anyone in my family ever playing bourré, so I started to look for people who still play in the present day, if only just to see what I was missing. I didn’t have to look that far to find them.
Bourré is said to have its roots in the court of King Louis XI (1423–1483), whose finance minister was one Jean Bourré. (Another origin story cites the word’s meaning, “stuffed,” which serves as a slang term for drunkenness.) It traveled to Acadiana in the pockets of French settlers and is now mostly played in Cajun Country during family gatherings and festive holidays. And that’s a little ironic, because it is not a friendly card game: The rules are contrived so that successful play forces a loss on all fellow players, and the penalty for losing is steep.
The rules are contrived so that successful play forces a loss on all fellow players, and the penalty for losing is steep.
Bourré, or booray in non-Louisiana dialects, is a hearts-meets-poker game played with a standard card deck wherein each player buys in at a certain amount. After the ante, five cards are dealt to each player; the dealer then flips a card, either from his hand or from the deck, to establish the trump suit (the cards that beat all other suits) and each player is allowed to either fold or exchange up to five cards for another bet.
During a round, each player must play a card to match the suit of the first card played by the dealer, or whomever took the last trick. A signature aspect of bourré is the forced plays: the players must try to thwart the other players at all turns, so if they can’t play a card of the same suit (whether or not it’s higher), a trump card must be played. When a player plays the highest card in a round, they win a trick; if any player fails to win a trick of the five per hand available, they bourrée (which is the verb form of the word) and must match the pot. If two players end up with the same number of tricks, no one wins the pot. (Another signature aspect of the game is the speed at which the pot grows.)
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It sounds simple on paper, but to a degree, the rules depend on where you end up playing the game. Some aspects even change from house to house. Danny Langlois, who grew up playing bourré in Morganza, explained that the house rules are different from game to game and are negotiated before anyone starts playing. “We’d argue about the rules for hours sometimes,” he said.
Christie Matherne Hall
Outside of Louisiana, rounds of bourré aren’t common, but professional sports teams have picked up the game over the years, and it’s now commonly played by athletes in locker rooms and aboard planes in transit to games. There, it’s played a little differently. In at least the NBA version of the game, the dealer has a great advantage: the trump suit is chosen by the dealer after the dealer has looked at his or her hand. When one player has such an advantage, the trash talk may escalate, and soon, money may not be the biggest thing at stake.
When one player has such an advantage, the trash talk may escalate, and soon, money may not be the biggest thing at stake.
Case in point: Nine years ago, Javaris Crittenton and Gilbert Arenas of the Washington Wizards walked into a locker room after practice, guns in tow. Arenas brought four guns, none of them loaded; Crittenton brought in a loaded gun and pointed it at Arenas. Nobody pulled any triggers that day, but both players were suspended and their NBA careers were derailed, all because Javaris Crittenton had been on the losing end of a bourré game on the team plane two days earlier. Arenas’s unloaded guns were a manifestation of a trash-talking joke he made at the end of the game, when he told Crittenton he’d bring the gun Crittenton could shoot him with, but Crittenton took the joke more seriously and brought his own. The tale accentuates the high-stakes, irreverent culture of bourré in play: tempers get hot, and in competitively-natured people, the jokes can get real.
Arenas recently told Action Network during an interview: “I’ve heard that those Celtics teams, with Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen and Paul Pierce, those guys were betting Rolls-Royces on a plane. There’s nothing fun about that. Those guys are trying to ruin you. It’s like putting Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, and Floyd Mayweather on a gambling table. That’s not about money. They have money. [...] For that moment, they’re taking your soul.”
Christie Matherne Hall
The average family bourré table in Louisiana likely doesn’t get to the point of soul-taking, but wedding ring antes, friends becoming enemies, and marriages ending over the game are not unheard of. I read a woman’s opinion printed in a New York Times article from 1996 that a wife should never play the game with her husband, because “[you] don’t have no friends when you play bourré.”
My brother-in-law, Derek Langlois, invited his father Danny over for a bourré night so I could see the game in action. They both happen to be from Morganza, in Pointe Coupee Parish, which is a bit of a bourré hub. Danny Langlois is a widely experienced player but was patient with my family and me as we learned the game’s mechanics and betted with Halloween candy. (My dad declined to play with us, saying that watching us play reminded him of how the game had roused his temper in the past. That could be why I didn’t grow up playing it.)
Soon enough, though, Danny got animated and was slamming down his trumps and flicking his cards across the table, all the while relaying to us how he knew what cards were in our hands.
Christie Matherne Hall
“You gotta leave your tricks face-up,” he told us. “That’s how you know if people are reneging.”
When a player reneges, it means he or she has not heeded the forced play rules of the game, and thus is cheating. For instance, if a player can’t follow suit and plays a different off-suit card instead of the trump card he or she is holding onto, it’s a renege. Depending on house rules, reneging can earn a range of penalties but usually ends up with the same penalty as a bourrée: the guilty party must match the pot. But to spot a renege, you have to pay attention to who is playing what, which likely comes after years of playing the game; I certainly wasn’t able to spot a renege in a few hours’ time.
Far away from enraged locker room showdowns and in-flight games—down in Marrero—the game’s trash talk component can become an oral transmission of familial data. Greg Theriot, bourré enthusiast and native of Marrero, explained that one of his favorite parts of teaching the game to new players is nailing an impression of his father, who has a family-specific stable of trash-talk phrases gleaned from years of playing with his relatives. “The language around this game is a snowball that keeps gathering mass as it rolls through the years,” said Theriot. “If the dealer finds the number of cards exchanged is suspiciously low, we will howl in our best Cajun accent, ‘Somebody’s lying!’ If someone tilts their cards so the table can see them, we’ll get told, ‘That’s how you get shot!’”
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“My father will channel my grandfather and start calling us ‘Chester’ and ‘Congetta’—names of his uncles and friends of the family. I actually only know these names in the context of bourré.”
In Theriot’s eyes, the trash talk is the game within the game, inextricable from the bigger picture. “We have definitely added our own touches to the sort of meta-game of the call-and-response around the table, though, and that’s inseparable from the game in my experience,” he said.
Theriot, a general gaming enthusiast, is considering developing a bourré app for use on mobile devices. The game’s forced plays and simple rules make it a natural fit for an algorithm, which is great for app development. Theriot plans to include the phrases he’s collected from his family’s bourré table, and he may even source recordings of his father howling “Pee-poo!” and other such phrases spliced in at the right moments.
Similarly, in the town of Arnaudville, bourré is a cultural vehicle. LSU students in the French immersion program gather around bourré tables with the area’s native French speakers, and the game acts as an icebreaker for the program, called LSU sur les Deux Bayous. It’s meant to teach culture as well as language, and as the tables switch every half hour, players get to meet everyone in the room while speaking and learning the game entirely in French.
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Mavis Frugé, who was honored by the French government in 2015 for her Louisiana French cultural work with NUNU Arts and Culture Collective, still plays la bourré with her friends and family on a monthly basis and loves to share the game with others as part of her cultural heritage. “After a large family meal, some may watch football, some will just sit around and visit, but there is always a bourré table in action,” she said. “It is an old tradition and a learning tool.”
One can only assume that no one is betting cars or wedding rings during the annual Sur les Deux Bayous bourré social, but unless you speak French, you’ll never know for sure.
