Blot, bazaar blot, a national obsession…

by Maria Titizian

Published: Friday November 20, 2009 in Living in Armenia

A screenshot of one of the websites devoted to blot. When you don't have friends around to drink scotch and chain-smoke with, you can still play the game.

Yerevan - When we were little, most weekends my father would play Blot (or Belote). A group of his friends, with their families in tow, would come over to our place, or we would be shipped to someone else's home so that the fathers could play blot.

Growing up, I never thought much about it, nor about card games in general. There wasn't much to think about; four men, sitting at a table, drinking scotch, and chain-smoking while the women sat around and complained that their men were playing blot, drinking scotch, and chain-smoking late into the night. The children would watch TV, play mindless games, or sit around, generally bored, irritated, and sleepy.

Whenever I was particularly bored with the other children, I would walk up to my dad, place my arm on his shoulder, and ask, "Who's winning?" The answer was always the same: "Hayere" – the Armenians.

They played late into the night, and none of the women ventured to walk up to her husband to say it was time to go, that the hostess was tired, and the kids had fallen asleep in different areas of the house. They had learned a lesson long time ago, that you don't interrupt a game of blot. At least that's how it went in my mother's generation.

My childhood associations with blot, therefore, weren't always endearing.

Fast-forward 15 years. I am newly married and am being taught blot by my husband and another couple because they need a fourth person for the game, which is played in pairs. I write down the rules. In a trump suit (or dominant suit) you must play Jack 9 Ace 10 King Queen 8 7. In a nontrump suit, you play Ace 10 King Queen Jack 9 8 7. I try to keep track of the dizzying amount of information you must retain in order to play the game.

Blot is a 32-card trick-taking game that originated in France sometime at the beginning of the 20th century. The rules of the game were first published in 1921. Strange, because just as I thought God was Armenian when I was little, I always thought that blot was an Armenian invention. All the grown Armenian men I knew played blot incessantly.

Then came the wilderness years. Working and raising two children in a fast-paced environment didn't always lend itself to what I considered selfish leisure and recreation, i.e., no more blot for me.

Fast-forward to Armenia. We have moved to the homeland. We are still in shock every morning when we see Mount Ararat from our window. We are struggling to understand this homeland that we have embraced.

Living in Armenia, among other things, afforded us the opportunity to have a constant stream of friends and relatives visiting and coming over to our place for food, drinks, and what else - a good game of blot.

So I brought out the rules of the game that I had kept, and then tried to keep up in a game where the players were blot aficionados. It wasn't always pretty.

During the early years of our move, my father-in-law came to visit and as my luck would have it, I had to be his partner, no thanks to my husband. You don't know my father-in-law - a tall, sinewy, tough villager who takes his blot very seriously. I made him promise at the outset of the game that he was not to yell at me if I played incorrectly (a typical occurance during any game of blot). He grunted and we began. I can still hear his voice ringing in my ears....

Perhaps you're wondering why I'm writing about a card game and what that has, if anything, to do with living in Armenia. Well, like backgammon (nardi or tavli) and chess (shakhmad or chadrak) blot is a national pastime.

One year we had gone on a picnic with my son's classmates and their parents. We had driven north of the city to a beautiful wooded area where we were going to spend some quality time with each other, get some fresh air, and have a barbecue. As soon as we arrived, several tables were set up and the fathers paired off and began playing blot. Not the blot I knew, but bazaar blot, another version of the same game. Asking to play, as a woman and a mother, no less, would've been sacrilegious, so I stayed back with the other mothers and helped prepare the barbecue.

During the preparations, we needed extra skewers, so I walked back to the car to get some. On my way there I saw three little 11-year-old boys (classmates of my son's) huddled around a large, ancient tree stump, which had been converted into a table. They were playing blot. Here was my chance! I walked up to them and asked if they needed a fourth player. Three pairs of dark eyes widened with surprise and then, as children often are nonjudgmental and more tolerant than most adults, they invited me to join them with glee.

Their joy was short-lived. They used a terminology for the suits that was alien to me (i.e., ghar, kep) and were playing bazaar blot, which I didn't know. When they saw that I was dragging them back, one precocious boy taking pity on my ineptitude at the game waved me off and suggested I go and join the other mothers, presumably where I belonged.

So when my son asked, cajoled, begged us to play blot with him a few nights ago, there was only one thing we could do - bring out the deck of well-worn cards and play the game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belote, www.blot.am, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=24293532956 “The Official Armenian Belote Players Club”, http://www.blotgame.com (Russian) “The Official Site of the Favorite Armenian Card Game”