Page "Card game" Paragraph 9

It should be noted that there is nothing static or " official " about this process.

For the majority of games, there is no one set of universal rules by which the game is played, and the most common ruleset is no more or less than that.

Many widely played card games, such as Canasta and Pinochle, have no official regulating body.

The most common ruleset is often determined by the most popular distribution of rulebooks for card games.

Perhaps the original compilation of popular playing card games was collected by Edmund Hoyle, a self-made authority on many popular parlor games.

The U. S. Playing Card Company now owns the eponymous Hoyle brand, and publishes a series of rulebooks for various families of card games that have largely standardized the games ' rules in countries and languages where the rulebooks are widely distributed.

However, players are free to, and often do, invent " house rules " to supplement or even largely replace the " standard " rules.